A large number of software projects fail both in government and industry

Reader comment on: Big Bad Government

Submitted by Lyle (United States), Jul 11, 2013 16:40

As much of Obamacare's implementation is a software project it falls in the category of software failures. There have been many of these both in government (such as the FBI data storage system) and industry,. A few get it right but one of the big problems is that the problem changes while the software development is in progress. Of course software development is mostly a people process, thus an issue of team organization and management.

It appears in many respects that IT's technological capabilities exceed the capacity of humans to put together systems to use them, and/or the best is often the enemy of good enough. Even Google and the like have software busts but the larger the number of folks affected the bigger the story. (Consider the recent UK bank software failure where folks could not access their accounts for about a week as a private example)

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