Different Day, Same Problem (only Worse)

For as long as I've been in this business, we've sent our requirements to a developer farm and gotten back exactly what we asked for — and it's never what we wanted, because we don't know how to tell anybody what we want. Then AI showed up, and a whole lot of people decided they didn't need the developer farm anymore. They'd just tell the AI themselves. Here's the problem: you still don't know what to tell it. You just found a faster, cheaper way to get exactly what you asked for — and the bill doesn't arrive on launch day.

This week I go back to the oldest failure in software, because the trend keeps repeating and every lap costs more. PMI's research says poor requirements management is the primary cause almost half the time when projects miss their goals. Queensland Health's payroll system went live "after ten aborted attempts" — and when IBM argued a developer only knows what the business requirements tell it, the Commission of Inquiry said a vendor is "more than a software developer." NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter not because nobody wrote a units standard, but because "the SIS… was not followed." And Lidl spent roughly half a billion euros customizing SAP toward the way it had always done things before pulling the plug.

 

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