I was part of a panel at a university recently speaking to prospective computer science students. The panel members were from industry — a few of the biggest companies and few smaller ones. We each had ten minutes to speak before QA, so I stripped my talk down to two simple points. The first point was that IT is fun. We truly build amazing things. I’ve been in the business 35 years, and I have never been bored. Each day offers a new challenge. The other point was that there will be plenty of jobs for decades to come just trying to get things right. Software sucks. No product on the market has more defects than software and no projects have a failure rate close to that of IT development work.

The next generation can live off the argument that they can certainly do better than the fogies doing the work now. The challenge for them, as it was for us we made the same claim, is living up to the bold promises. I have been through five distinct new approaches to building software, each designed to deliver better products and better delivery management. Each has moved the ball forward a bit, but we still have a LONG way to go.

Just how bad are we? There are many studies of failure in IT, but the results are all over the place. The most optimistic estimate I can find says that about 30% of projects fail. When I mention that number, a fair number of people tell me it is too low, but let’s grant ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We fail 30% of the time.

How does that compare to other industries? Before we take on the masters of quality lets start with an easier opponent – how about used car salesmen? Every year in United States, about 45 million used cars are sold. The Feds estimate that the odometers of about 450,000 of these have been tampered with, and that in another 500,000 cases the seller fails to disclose a serious known defect. That works out to a failure rate around 2%.

We in the IT business are 15 times worse than used-car salesmen. Yet, the demand for our products and services is tremendous. IT related professions dominate the top-20 positions on the US Department of Labor’s list of high-growth jobs. Why is this so, if our products are so bad?

The answer is that software, bugs and all, delivers real value. We would love our programs to work without error, to never crash, to never need patching, but even with these sorts of problems, software does amazing things. Once in awhile we all encounter a program that makes us go wow. Remember the first time you used online mapping? That was a wow, but we quickly get bored. The amazing becomes commonplace — part of the wallpaper. That’s sad. I wish it was possible to flip a switch, and show ourselves and the world juts how far we’ve come. It would be a cruder, poorer, and much more boring world without us.

That said, software is still crap – amazing crap so customers will continue buying, but crap nonetheless and we owe them better. The challenge of making software better is a difficult one. All of the Justice League blog entries are, at root, about this one subject. Sometimes we write about broad issues other times about the very specific, but our objective is always to make software better. Better functionality, more reliable, and more secure.

This blog, rather than being about solutions, is about the intriguing, challenging, and sometimes frustrating dichotomy of software, it is both amazing, with a capacity to dazzle and inspire while it is also mundane – just a bit of bug ridden code. The Roman God Janus has two faces – one facing forward, one backward.

Building software is much the same. We constantly envision the future and it drives us to imagine and to realize that imagination we build ever more complicated systems. There is the rub. The other face of Janus looks back to the past. In IT that is the hard job of not making the software, but making it good. Janus was the god of doorways, a wonderful image for IT. The doorway to the future in IT rests on equal measure on vision and quality, looking forward to what can be done and backwards at what we have. We must aspire to be Janus.

A final observation that will set the stage for a future blog entry. Our troubles lie in the imbalance between the forward looking face and the backward. There is so much potential in software that we are constantly reaching farther; farther in some cases than we can deliver. It is the reaching that gets us unto trouble, but it also the reaching that keeps us energized and fresh, and once in while makes our customers say “Wow.”

This entry was posted by Craig Miller on Friday, March 30th, 2007 and is filed under Software Security, Software Quality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.