No More Software Development Failures, Please

Fowler has joined ThoughtWorks, a Chicago-based software developer that uses Agile techniques almost exclusively. ThoughtWorks has worked on the Caterpillar project, and it employed iterative development on a retail application for The Gap. For Cisco, it integrated sales software with financial tracking systems.

"The way software is developed is fundamentally flawed," says ThoughtWorks CEO Roy Singham. "Think of it as climbing Mount Everest. Do you set a plan and say, ’On day seven we’ll be here and the weather will be this and I’ll need my ice pick’? You can’t do that.

"CEOs have irrational expectations for what [software] can do, and CIOs don’t have the gumption to tell them the truth," Singham adds. "Agile is a much more honest approach. I believe it’s the next wave."

So does Kolence, who thinks Agile Development is the best hope yet to render his 1967 paper irrelevant.

For Kolence, it’s been a long, frustrating struggle. "At North American Aviation in the early ’60s, I was responsible for programming commercial applications at one of the airports," he recalls. "We never got anything done on time."

Just last year, Kolence worked with an aerospace company that couldn’t write a requirements document, he says. It got so bad, he told off the head of the project and warned him that they’d end up trashing the software. Which is exactly what they’re doing now.

"It’s frustrating, especially when it’s all ad hoc stuff," Kolence says. "There are times I’m just so unhappy with the whole field. You can hear the strain in my voice. This is why I’m semiretired. I’m working at a local hardware store now. It’s fun. It’s fun to deal with people who are fixing stuff. It’s fun to say to them, ’This is how you do plumbing.’"