Is it time to rethink project success?

The notion of success and failure in software projects are confusing. Failure is often considered in the context of the iron triangle as the inability to meet time, cost and performance constraints. Yet, while there is a consensus around the prevalence of project failure, new projects seem destined to repeat past mistakes. This paper tries to advance the discussion by offering a new perspective for reasoning about the meaning of success and the different types of software project failures. The paper advocates rising beyond the fixation with internal parameters of efficiency. It begins by discussing the limited insights from existing project failure surveys, before offering a four level model addressing the essence of successful delivery and operation in software projects and considering the different measures required in order to utilise richer measurements of success

Reflecting on Recurring Failures in IoT Development

As IoT systems are given more responsibility and autonomy, they offer greater benefits, but also carry greater risks. We believe this trend invigorates an old challenge of software engineering: how to develop high-risk software-intensive systems safely and securely under market pressures? As a first step, we conducted a systematic analysis of recent IoT failures to identify engineering challenges. We collected and analyzed 22 news reports and studied the sources, impacts, and repair strategies of failures in IoT systems. We observed failure trends both within and across application domains. We also observed that failure themes have persisted over time. To alleviate these trends, we outline a research agenda toward a Failure-Aware Software Development Life Cycle for IoT development. We propose an encyclopedia of failures and an empirical basis for system postmortems, complemented by appropriate automated tools

Falling down is part of Growing up: : The Study of Failure and the Software Engineering Community

Non peer reviewe