Who Pays For Software Waste?

You'd need 10,000 bricks to build a 3 bedroom house. If your house builder said to you he needed 30,000 - because 20,000 of them will be waste - you'd be forgiven for telling him to take a running jump. In reality of course there is nothing like that amount of waste and nor should there be.

Very bespoke buildings, like the Taj Mahal, create a fair amount of waste. It took 22 years to complete and employed over 20,000 workers to shape and sculpture 100's of thousands of tons of white marble and coloured rocks. Some estimates put the waste here as high as 80%, but it’s hard to judge.

Waste in Software Development

A little-known fact is the amount of waste generated in software development. The US federal government has estimated as much as 75% of all software written is not used and is technically waste. A report from The Standish Group tracking enterprise software effectiveness, reckons that as much as 80% of all software development projects fail to meet expectations. In fact, if you're a large enterprise embarking on a software development project, you have a 1 in 5 chance of not completing the project at all. The wasted dollars runs into billions.

But in these times of environmental consciousness and prudence - not to mention efficiency and productivity - you'd think there'd be more focus on reducing waste. New techniques are helping but there's still a big gap.

The other major factor affecting software development is the need for the end product to be what users and customers want and need. User centred design, customer centricity and customer experience are all buzzwords commonly used to explain this imperative.

Here’s the paradox; although there is a strong focus on the commercial, environmental and end user needs, none of the commonly used software development methods truly deliver sustained value. Agile, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Continuous Development all aim to achieve radical improvements in time, cost and outcome. But the truth is all have failed to overcome the three biggest obstacles in software development:

1. the time it takes to get set up to start creating the solution
2. any tangible outcome in a few days
3. access and engagement of real end users.

It takes a bold CTO to say to his developers: ' Go and spend time with end users and develop stuff for them on the fly; let me manage the risks, - you go on and get stuff done.'

Colin Ellis goes into some detail about the causes of project failures - the two biggest being lack of good project management and proper culture building skills. In previous blogs, I've talked about the personal qualities needed by leaders to apply more radical development techniques. It takes courage, imagination, belief and commitment to change. But is it so risky? Not really.

Having said that, at an organisational and cultural level it’s very hard for those providing technology solutions to be empowered and incentivised to get close to end users. Maintaining equilibrium in enterprise IT is all about the removal of risk, keeping systems up and running, security, compliance and standards. Taking a more humanistic approach to software development doesn't come naturally to everyone.

Yet, the application suites and serverless platforms available now in the cloud, encourage innovation, trying things out, getting stuff done - quickly - and they're surprisingly easy to set up and use. The Google Cloud Platform is a great example. Very easy to set up and easy to manage.

Reducing waste - going #BeyondAgile

We see a movement now of going beyond agile. Revisiting first principles and working round some of the institutional and operational barriers which have created waste and slowed the delivery of outcomes. The code written using these new methods delivers exactly what customers need and want - whether that be a prototype or the fully functioning and integrated App. Zero waste.

Getting started with new software development techniques is never easy. But the good news is it’s getting a lot easier and it’s generating tangible results customers and end users need and want in a fraction of the time of earlier methods. It's time to go #BeyondAgile. No one wants to pay for unnecessary waste.