EDABlog

Im curious at the increase rate of sucess in a number of surveys such as the later CHAOS surveys. Looking in the detail however it appears that projects after peaking in 2000 the amount of time overrun and the amount of features completed have dropped dramatically in the vast majority of projects. Not sure what it means but to me it DOESNT mean software development is getting better if features are getting dropped  and there are increasing time blow outs.

Things that come to mind

• Standards for success and projects have increasing amounts of over estimation to prevent failure and hence they come on time and on budget. (See should projects have risk contingencies)
• Core elements which are critical to the business with good ROI are being prioritized and delivered while less critical features are not.
• Less framework creation /coding is resulting in higher success. ( Projects with poor framework progress are/were often cancelled early as they had few deliverables)
• How can the time blow out and the project still be considered a success
• Projects are smaller. A lot less managers have the stomach for the $100M+ projects  in the 90s

 It also very interesting surveys with a loose success definition have a much higher rate

eg

http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2007.html

shows success rates as 63-72% vs 34% for Chaos . I think you MUST have a concrete definition to get anything from a survey in terms of project management and Development methodologies otherwise it is too subjective based on the team .

Chaos defines success as “on time, on budget, meeting the spec”,

With looser definitions of success you get  some interesting things

• "40.9% of respondents considered cancelling a troubled project to be a success. "
• The offshore rate of 43% shows how subjective a non standard definition can be ( People will rate external teams harsher than teams they are part off) . I have yet to meet a company that allows offshore firms Agile methods. People often ask these firms fixed price - which no doubt affects quality and perception but the ultimate goal of ROI is likely to be better ( IMHO).
  

 Yet project success and budgets in Agile environments are hard to relate back to the requirements and original plan.

My feeling is projects are getting a bit more succesfull however i also think the cost of new software has gone up massively.  This is good in that business are willing to pay it but bad in terms of ultimate benefit and ROI .  Part of this is due to higher demands from business while in the past internal applications had a simple grey form now people  demand colours , fonts a web interface for access at home , animated indicators etc  

Its worth stating the massive improvements in the tools ( where did the time go) . I'm definetly become a believer in Parkinsons law which has pretty big implications for software development 

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

In its generalized form.

The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource.

In software its more likely that the work expands to fill the time available +0-50% depending on how strong the management is .

Looking further i found this

http://www.focusedperformance.com/articles/ccpm.html pretty spot on in describing the problem.

An aggressive target duration schedule, along with elimination of task due-dates, minimizes impact of
"Parkinson's Law."

 Anyway the thoughts are a bit loose in this post .