Monday assignments - matthijsbos/swe2013team5 GitHub Wiki

Every team member is required to submit a report on software engineering topics in a weekly interval.

Week 1:

Goal of the assignment: Understand reasons for (software) engineering project failure. Good understanding of failure will also enable us to analyze adequacy of engineering methods.

Some project failures are (London Ambulance Systems and to a lesser extent Therac) are examples of total lack of professionalism and demonstrate why we demand a professional process and apply best practices. Many other failures happen in well organized projects led by experienced and highly qualified professionals. Looking back it's understandable why they failed. However given the information at that time, the upcoming failure was not so evident.

Study a well docmented failure, where you can read audit reports and preferrable scientific or official analysis. Examples of such are plentiful: seasprite (1,1Mld Aud), Sentinel / virtual case file (FBI) , London Stock Exchange, Denver Luggage system, Heathrow luggage system, London Ambulance System, Therac, Ariane rocket, English digitized medical fiasco, waterschappen (Dutch) and UWV (Dutch), Overstock.com, Sainsbury,....... You can also learn from other major engineering disasters: the official reports on Fukushima, Noord Zuid lijn (www.novatv.nl/data/media/db_download/79_b46466.pdf), Betuwe lijn, Space shuttle, and on and on....

When studying these reports ask yourself:

  • What was done to make the project successful
  • What was the reasons for failure (the technical reason / manifestation, the root cause, and why it was not spotted and contained / mitigated)
  • what can we learn from that about the adequacy of methods and solutions
  • What were the first signs of failure and how was responded to those failures

for inspiration check these links:

•www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-long-dismal-history-of-software-project-failure.html www.codinghorror.com/blog/

•spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/why-software-fails

•www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachumd/horror.html

www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/resources/IanS/SE7/CaseStudies/index.html

•h ttp://www.lessons-from-history.com/node/89

Week 2