Where is Software Development failing?

With the recession continuing to take a heavy toll on everybody and everything, the software product development teams seem to have taken some measures to cope with it. However, the question that comes up is; have these measures compromised the quality of software and in some cases, have they contributed to software product development failures all together? Human errors that are avoidable seem to have been one of the consequences of these measures.

Because most development teams do not know what to build, it fails to meet the peoples needs, the time and the resources to do research has seemed unnecessary and this has resulted in unclear requirements and the eventual failure of the software. Another measure that companies have been taking is setting up overly unrealistic schedules as well as overly optimistic ones. When a schedule seems unrealistic there is the tendency to skip things or rush through the development cycle. When projects are thus compressed, there is a high chance that some thing will be overlooked or will not be given the needed attention.

The cutting down of executive sponsorship and support has also meant that internal politics and budget cuts will undermine the overall project. This will of course result in sub-standard or poor products. Some software product development teams have also been forced to lay off senior higher paid developers. When senior developers and those with experience leave a project early in its lifetime, this will hurt both the project as well as the company. While this move to cut down on costs seems warranted, it has to be remembered that the future software product development teams of such companies will often be unstable. Senior and more experienced developers take with them a lot of experience that just is not available any other place leaving behind lower-paid workers with less experience. However, when you look at the time lost due to the learning curve and the mistakes of the less experienced developers, it probably negates the savings in the salaries paid. This is the price companies have to pay for making hasty, project-wrecking decisions in a poor economy.

Another foolhardy cutbacks being taken in the software product development projects is skipping testing. While this is an obvious path to software failures, it seems that many companies are using this recessionary cost-saving method to keep their coding teams busy. If this trend continues, it can be expected that embarrassing outages will begin to surface. If companies take note of these project pitfalls and avoid them despite the economy downturn, we can expect to see less software project failures.