Why Do Software Development Projects Fail?

What are some reasons why custom software projects fail? What should we avoid when building a custom application? How do we ensure success for our project? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

[ivanjasenov]

"Tools and techniques, don't replace good projet management" Gold!

[josephjensen]

Wow. I can speak from personal experience that you are absolutely right. I've had some epic fails and I pretty much made all the mistakes you mention. Thanks for summarizing the pitfalls so well so that I can more easily remember them for the future!

[pawelpawel]

Yes I admit of being guilty of feature creep and being hurraoptimistic about the schedule :D. Precisely written requirements is an absolute gold. The person who understands bits of programmers and the business is also an amazing support. Cheers thanks for great analysis.

[Norman_Fleming]

Having/being a PM that can sit between the users and development that actually understand both sides can make things so much more likely to succeed. Knowing the lingo of both sides and translating back and forth in meetings, dragging out the requirements and concerns. bi-directional communications. Restating assumptions back to the other side as they are made. When I was acting as a PM We would be in meetings and while planning V1 I would be pushing things out to V2 and V3 vocally so everyone understood how things had to happen. It helped everyone visualize and set expectations that things take time.

[blackenedsprite]

I was literally on a call 2 hours ago where a project was basing research into packages, scope, approach, everything off of an assumption of how the user wanted it because 'he's not available on calls, he's too busy'. An hour of my time saying repeatedly 'well we can't plan this then, because we don't actually know what they want'. Could've done without that.

[opietwoep]

Very nicely done. Im guilty of a lot of these. I’m an SQL Developer. For me the biggest headache is not getting the details the user. And a good PM is an absolute must.

[antoniusivan]

thanks Tim. You are my best motivator for work.

[waleed-encoder]

Hi, first I would like to thank you for what are you doing and providing in this channel. Second, I want to ask you about how much we need of solving problems to start web dev with asp and other tools and frameworks?

[nathansodja]

Am on my third failed project, this time we succeeded in shipping but the users claim they prefer the manual way, apparently the AI shd be doing everything...

[GSergejj]

What do you think about risk plans? A list of risks and mitigation strategies. Do you think they are useful/ essential too?

[chrisjohansson]

Tim do you actually use TDD in a daily basis or just when it makes sense. I mean when your building a business crud app that saves to a database, is it really necessary to use TDD. I can understand if there was some heavy logic in between but to write tests to perform crud or other basic functions never really appealed to me.

[michaelnurse]

A lot of software projects are dead in the water for no technical reasons at all, the main culprit is that business moves fast and zig-zags when new information is discovered.
"We need customer portal because competitor A has one".
Six months later...
"Oh, we forgot to tell you, we found out that our competitors customers HATED dealing through a portal, but we have a new project for you...our competitor has an automated inventory system"
Projects should:
1. Deal with the main pain points of the business.
2. Those pain points should be *say* 5 years old and *say* $100M to the red.
Then you will get support instead of backlash with Tim's 9 points.

[The_Ethical_Slacker]

You have to allow for feature creep. Think about it. The alternative is delivering something the client doesn't want. This particular feature might have become critical to the client's whole business, so who are you to say they can't have it? This is *soft*ware, remember. Soft. Not hard. Easy to change. If it can't be changed, then you have a bad design.
As you did identify, though, there is a trade-off between the richness of the application and the duration of development, but it is the developer's responsibility to convey that to their line manager/the client/whichever applies. Nothing more. They certainly don't have the right to say, "you can't have that", That is for the client to choose.

[randyriegel]

I hate feature creep. At my day job it's decently easy. I they start asking for things beyond the scope of the ticket they created I just tell them to create another ticket and someone will get to it. My manager backs us completely on things like this. As far as my side work I'll take a look and estimate time involved and then let the customer know their "quote" just went up because I quoted you for a specific thing... any extra needs more money :)

[ValentineMasina]

"I love weekend projects; They last about a month" - Tim Corey🤣

[phillismable]

Because they spent too much time listening to Tim's videos and not enough time programming.