“We waste billions of dollars each year on entirely preventable mistakes”
It is estimated that organizations and governments worldwide will spend about $1 trillion this year on IT projects. Recent data suggests only 35% of them are likely to be completed on time and on budget, with all their originally specified features and functions. About 20% will be abandoned often after multibillion dollar investment and the biggest fall most often. There are many reasons for this,
§ Low quality in development
§ Improper project management
§ Less technical skills
§ Higher Development cost
§ Imperfect and insufficient testing
§ Poor Implementation
§ Poor integration
§ Software errors (Bugs)
§ Breakdowns in Software upgrades
When developing software’s higher standards must be kept with proper project management which will satisfy customer requirements. Low quality in development phase will result in rejecting the software in no time. This would also be result in higher development cost.
Also most effort must be given to testing in development phase of software. Testing must also carefully monitor for errors and bugs. Imperfect and insufficient testing will also affect badly on the development agency.
Poor integration between software modules will result in missing and incorrect data in the software system. Low quality in development, imperfect and insufficient testing can be identified as the main reasons for this. In US in December of 2007 significant software problems were continuing to occur in a new ERP payroll system for a large urban school system. More than one third of employees had received incorrect paychecks at various times since the new system went live the preceding January, resulting in overpayments of $53 million, as well as underpayments. Inadequate testing reportedly contributed to the problems.
Using the industry standards is a must when implementing the software at customer. Poor implementation will result in drawbacks which will affect the company’s reputation and software rejection when noticed by the client.
Large software’s must meet the technical specs with the future technology, software’s must be well fit with the other supporting systems such as database systems, networking topologies etc, operating systems etc. the software must also support the newer versions of these supporting systems. Crashes and breakdowns cannot be expected in well developed systems in software upgrades.
