Blowing the whistle on troubled software projects

D espite advances in software engineering, project failure temains a critical challenge for the software development communicy. According to the Standish Group's 1998 survey, only 26% of such projects wete delivered on time, on budget, and with promised functionality, wasting billions of dollars annually; 46% wete completed over budget and behind schedule, with fewer functions and features than orig nally specified, and could therefore be classified as runaway projects [10]. In 1994, a sur-^ vey by consulting company KPMG of 120 organizations in the UK found 62% of them had experienced a runaway project [7]. Today, you can fdl your shelves with books covering numerous examples of runaway software projects [3].