Capers Jones wrote:In his new book Reboot David takes a careful look at the software industry and the factors that affect the outcomes of software projects. These are some of the same issues I deal with in my own books. I’m glad to say that David and I seem to have reached similar conclusions, even though in recent years we have worked with different clients and in different countries.

Software is a troubling and paradoxical industry. On the plus or positive side, the software industry has brought forth amazing products that have changed the way people communicate, work, and even the way they entertain themselves. On the minus or negative side, large software projects have the highest failure rates of any commercial product in human history. Even when large software projects are not total failures, they usually run late and exceed their budgets by large amounts. And when the projects are delivered to customers, they are filled with thousands of bugs or errors.

David Longstreet’s new book he takes a long hard look at both the current state of the software industry itself, and of current software development practices. David concentrates on worst practices or the factors that have so often led to failure of software projects.

Among these worst practices can be found inadequate quality control, sloppiness when dealing with requirements changes, failure to select the most suitable technologies for projects with special needs, and the naïve belief that software generalists can handle complex technical tasks such as testing applications and achieving a high level of defect removal efficiency. In other technical fields, formal specialization has allowed professionals to achieve in-depth knowledge of important subsets of the overall knowledge of the profession. But software has not yet achieved enough sophistication to have many true specialties.