Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing

Summary

“Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen?”KGB Chairman Charkov’s question to inorganic chemist Valery Legasov in HBO’s “Chernobyl” miniseries makes a good epitaph for the hundreds of software development, modernization, and operational failures I have covered for IEEE Spectrum since my first contribution, to its September 2005 special issue on learning—or rather, not learning—from software failures. I noted then, and it’s still true two decades later: Software failures are universally unbiased. They happen in every country, to large companies and small. They happen in commercial, nonprofit, and governmental organizations, regardless of status or reputation.Global IT spending has more than tripled in constant 2025 dollars since 2005, from US $1.7 trillion to $5.6 trillion, and continues to rise. Despite additional spending, software success rates have not markedly improved in the past two decades. The result is that the business and societal costs of failure continue to grow as software proliferates, permeating and interconnecting every aspect of our lives.For those hoping AI software tools and coding copilots will quickly make large-scale IT software projects successful, forget about it. For the foreseeable future, there are hard limits on what AI can bring to the table in controlling and managing the myriad intersections and trade-offs among systems engineering, project, financial, and business management, and especially the organizational politics involved in any large-scale software project. Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn. As software practitioners know, IT projects suffer from enough management hallucinations and delusions without AI adding to them.As I noted 20 years ago, the drivers of software failure frequently are failures of human imagination, unrealistic or unarticulated project goals, the inability to handle the project’s complexity, or unmanaged risks, to name a few that today stil...