Documentation often suffers because clients and developers alike fail to recognise its importance, instead prioritising development activities to demonstrate progress and value. Documentation supports the entire lifecycle of software development: from helping individual developers recall why they built something in a certain way, to enabling continuity between developers, to facilitating user adoption. Thus, insufficient documentation can undermine the success of an entire project. [Read More]

Unrealistic resource estimation. Estimation is the primary basis to secure the resources required for project execution. Failure to understand the skills, labour hours, and time required to successfully address requirements frequently leads to budget overruns and project failures (McGrath, 2008; Lehtinen et al., 2014) [Read More]

Software testing: The lack of software testing and a proper strategy for conducting the aforementioned test, can push back a software project release immensely, or even worse, it can cause life-altering problems in the production. Additionally, when upgrading a legacy system to a new one, it is important to ensure the testing coverage has not been decreased and hence opened the project to a potential failure. [Read More]

A study demonstrates that simply knowing someone’s email (or a similar personal identifier) makes it possible to see what kind of products the victim buys online. The attack leverages the mechanisms used by advertisement companies that can track one person across multiple devices, and it is as simple as forging a browser cookie. In the case of retargeted ads, it is even possible to see what products the victim bought recently. [Read More]

The Standish Group concluded that there are five metrics to determine the chance of success: project size (in terms of the number or people and duration), project management methodology, skills of the team, skills of the product owner, and the organisation’s maturity. The success rates swing from 1 to 81% depending on the extremes, but a study found that exellence may bring the success rate to 95% (Gaikema et al. 2019). Also, an investigation on IT project failures in Malaysia found that, besides a lack of skills, problems such as scope creep, poor specifications, lack of support, and turnover are the most commonly reported issues (Sarif et al. 2018). Kasser&Williams (1998), a baseline for older studies, identifies “poor requirements” as the only frequent technical reason for failure, followed by “human” reasons such as a lack of communication or good project management practices. [Read More]