Software Project Failures & Major Reasons (SPM)

 Software Project Failures & Major Reasons 

Even after utilizing the collective software development experience of hundreds of software companies and software experts over the years, across the globe, a large chunk of software projects still fail. Therefore it is very important to know the reasons that lead to software project failure.

®    Accepting a forced schedule without substantial data and analysis: Someone in your organization publicly speculates that the project will be done by a particular date, thus unintentionally commits the team to that deadline.

®    Adding excessive personnel to achieve unrealistic schedule compression: How do project managers deal with an overly optimistic schedule? One common response is to staff up the project, often adding way more people than necessary to complete the project. Not only does this drastically increase the cost of a project, but it also decreases the quality. Having more people involved in the project increases opportunities for miscommunications and also makes it more challenging to integrate the different sections of code together.

®    Failing to account and adjust for requirements growth or change: Requirements growth is a problem if you’re adding functionality without allotting more time and budget for development. In essence, you’re asking for more work in a shorter amount of time, a technique that we’ve already found does not work.

®    Emotional stakeholder negotiation that ignores facts and statistics: At some point or another we’ve all become attached to a particular project that we’ve worked on and become emotionally invested in its outcome. This may be the project where your reputation is on the line. Stress can cloud one’s thinking. A stakeholder may call for a 12-month schedule in order to impress a customer despite the fact that reports from previous projects of similar sizes all show a 15 month lifecycle.

®    No End-user Involvement: If the user's point of view is not taken into consideration while developing the IT project you are definitely calling in for trouble. So failure to find and engage the right users to participate in the software development process is extremely disastrous.

Lack of Quality Testing: In most projects, the importance given to coding isn't given to testing. Honestly speaking testing calls for greater integrity and role in the entire software development lifecycle. Casual testing, testing under non-real-time environments contribute to testing failures. Bolder companies test their projects under live production environments.