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Sep 07Avoiding Development Disasters
by in Alex's Soapbox on 2007-10-09
As most development managers know, the FBI's Virtual Case File (VCF) system has become the epitome of the software industry's most expensive failed project. Running taxpayers between $100 and $200 million dollars over four years, the VCF delivered little more than a mountain of useless documentation, nearly a million lines of code that will never run in production and a whole lot of costly lessons. Worse still, the lessons offered from this multi-million dollar failure could have just as easily been found in a $50 software engineering textbook. In fact, the major factors behind VCF's failure read much like such a book's table of contents:
- Enterprise Architecture: VCF had none.
- Management: Developers were both poorly managed and micromanaged.
- Skilled Personnel: Managers and engineers with no formal training were placed in critical roles.
- Requirements: They were constantly being changed.
- Scope Creep: New features were added even after the project was behind schedule.
- Steady Team: More people were constantly added to the team in an attempt to speed the project.
While these are all valuable lessons that every development manager should take to heart, one of the most important -- and certainly least discussed -- lessons stems from one of the rare correct decisions made on the project: the decision to cut bait and scrap the whole thing.