Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters

by Robert L. Glass

Book Overview

Failure often teaches more than success. This book shows what went wrong in 16 of the worst software disasters of recent years -- and shows how to prevent your own software disasters. Software failure... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 013673443X
• ISBN13: 9780136734437
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Reports from the Disaster Areas of the IT Age

If you're looking for a solid book on avoiding IT disasters, this isn't it.On the other hand if you want to see what not to do, if you want to find good examples of what can go wrong in IT, if you need to put the fear of God in a CIO or a manager, then this is your book.Collecting reports on some of the worst, stupidest IT mistakes, the book examines what went wrong and why. It's dry and depressing reading (about halfway through I had to take a break), but its also informative. These are the real deals, and they aren't pretty.Though this will not be the greatest book you read or the most helpful, it's still very, very useful. It's good as a compliment to more helpful material, but the useful collecting of data and the attempts to be unbiased earn it 4 stars instead of 3.

Valuable to managers and project managers

This is a collection of project disasters with an eye towards the major project management failures rather than the technical issues. Though many of these have been previously published, the assembly is worth price of the book. This will be is valuable for anybody involved in high-level decision making on mission-critical (and smaller) IT/Internet software projects. If you want to educate your boss on why you can't begin work without clear objectives, scope, senior management involvement, etc., a few of these stories should clear his/her head. All the B-to-B internet hubs run by consortia should read this or be ready to end up in vol II.

A well-structured collection of disaster reports

The book is a previously unattempted collection of a series of papers from different sources about big and resounding software project failures. The emphasis is on management and organisational rather than on technical issues. Overall, it enlightens about what can go wrong and how, analysing the most common failure reasons.

Very interesting for what it is.

Know what you're getting when you buy this book! This book isn't a remedy book. Mostly, its about "famous software runaways", that is, projects that have made it into the mainstream media. It does talk about why those projects fail, but there is only one chapter on that, and its not the meat of the book. Also the descriptions are from a non-technical point of view, and are generally reprints from other sources. Buy this book if: A. You are a computer professional, and you want to know what really happened with the Denver baggage handling system, the DMV scrapped computer system, etc. This book does a pretty good summary of "what really happened" with each failed project in the book. B: You aren't a computer professional, but you have to contract for computer services and you want to know how and why big projects fail. For me, the best part of this book was finding out that the denver baggage system collapsed, not so much because the vendor didn't know what they were doing, but because they were sabotaged by their client (the city of Denver). The same people delivered a working baggage system for their original client, United Airlines, at that same airport; but they weren't sabotaged by UA.

Good reading

Although slightly short on analysis (you may want to check out Edward Yourdon's book "Death March" for that) this book presents a number of massive failures that made me think again about how large projects should be run and how lack of management, failure to communicate and plain politics can waste enormous amounts of money and lets profitable companies go bankrupt.It's not really a book about software engineering or large-scale project management but more a collection of anecdotal evidence.