What are the most common software development process failures?

How do you manage your Software requirements management process is often the starting point of the success or failure of your project. In my experience, following are the major issues in requirement management. 1) Incomplete & inconsistent Requirements defintion: Not all the stakeholders / legal / statuary requirements are considered. Non-functional requirements are often not focused. conflicting requirements from different stakeholders are not aligned. 2) Requirements are not reviewed/updated: Review of Requirements by engineering, Test, Supplier and customer is often not prioritised. This will cause the incorrect implementation and test. requirement changes due to change requests and defects are not properly managed and incorporated.

To improve the requirements quality, we can focus on the following: 1. Follow Simple way of writing requirements like User story, where it encourages more collaboration and discussions which needs be captured as part of Story. Capture the requirements on how the feature/fucntionality will be used by users. Define the Clear Acceptance/Verification criterias. 2. Define the Good Characteristics of Requirements (System, Software Requirements). These Characteristics needs to be explained to the teams, Architects who write the requirements. 3. Use tools which can analyze and provide assessment on the Requirement quality whether the requirements are following characteristics like: Uniqueness, Completeness, Consistency, and Maintainability.

In my experience, success requires a blueprint. Launching a successful software project requires careful navigation. Ill-defined requirements lead to building the wrong product, while siloed communication between developers, stakeholders and clients, breeds misunderstandings and rework. De-prioritizing testing throughout the development cycle leaves room for bugs to linger, and unrealistic timelines create a pressure cooker for errors. Setting unrealistic timelines can lead to a rushed job that frustrates users. The uncontrolled addition of new features (feature creep), can stall progress by diverting focus from core functionalities to unnecessary bells and whistles.

From my experience following are the most common reasons 1. Poor requirement understanding or frequently requirement changes in middle of the implementation 2. People are more focused on adding more feature or functionality instead of focusing on quality. 3. Quality of the software is given the least priority over the feature 4. Solutions are designed based on the technology rather then chosen technology solves the problem. 5. Continuous quality check such as automated testing is missing.

The following are the common software process failure 1. Focusing more on feature delivery than focusing on the quality of the already delivered feature. 2. Poor communication among the team. Most of the time people work in silos. Sometimes due to personality clashes, ego 3. People don't give more importance to software testing. The quality of the software is the least importance given. 4. When developing the software developer focuses more on the tech stack and functionality rather than also focusing performance and cost of the solution.

Software testing is the last gate to prevent defective software to reach customer but often it is not prioritised or prioritised too late. You can prevent inadequate testing by 1) Implement CI/CD gates for your unit, integration and Software system tests and ensure 100% tests are executed before the code is delivered. 2) Implement code coverage metrics (line, method, block, MC/DC) in CI/CD gates to ensure your code base is fully verified. Dead code also to be checked. 3) Implement the test management process to fulfil the requirements of standards such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, ASPICE, DO178C, ISO 26262. 4) Apply test driven development / V model to ensure testing is started early in the project and not just before the final release.

Testing is very important activity and especially inadequate testing can happen for the following reasons: 1. Inadequate test design/test cases, 2. In adequate test execution. To fix the Inadequate test execution, there should be good AUTOMATION on test cases which also integrated in the CI/CD build pipeline. It is unrealistic to execute all the test cases manually, especially in the larger projects. To fix the problem of Inadequate test design/test cases, teams needs to use proper test design techniques when deriving test cases, like Feature Interactions, Boundary Value, Equivalence Paritioning, State Transitions, Dependency test. 3. Teams should also focus on the CRITICAL features/module for test sufficiency.

I have seen Poor communication made project execution to nightmare and cause cost/schedule overrun. 1) Scope ambiguity will cause stakeholders to misunderstand and misinterpret the project scope and result in poor project planing & execution. 2) Incomplete or inaccurate requirements is often suffered by poor communication between stakeholders. Requirement sign-off process will help to address this issue. 3) Team collaboration and Progress Tracking: Remote and distributed teams will suffer due to poor communication. Agile ceremonies and tools could be applied to improve the communication and effective tracking the progress. 4) Quality: lack of communication on priorities will have a strong effect on poor process / product quality.

Successful project execution requires the smart balancing of scope, cost and schedule to deliver with quality. Often the case is projects fail to balance the expectation of customer and Project org. Following tools/methods could prevent/resolve unrealistic expectations. 1. Well defined contractual scope & RASIC 2. Requirement & Architecture sign-off by customer 3. Well defined Project plan & communication plan 4. Risk management process 5. Project reviews & Joint reviews with customer 6. APQP Joint reviews 7. IATF Audits & ASPICE assessments 8. Change / Problem management process. Major issues could be prioritised together with customer / Supplier 9. Release planning & approval together with customer 10. Continuous delivery to customer

Quality control is a critical step in the overall product development. Quality control should have clear Quality Plan/Quality strategies focus on the following: 1. Ensure there is a process is defined for all the activities, Simple and Clear Way of Working (WoW) for the projects. 2. Ensure the defined process is followed by having a proper Reviews, Audits, Gatings. 3. Bring the culture to the team, where the team abide to Definition of DONE (DoD) at each phases like Sprint, PI and also work items like Features, Stories. 4. Create a Transperency - Have Automated dashboards (data integrity) and monitor the Critical metrics/KPIs and highlight to the stakeholders. 5. Make Quality VISIBLE.

In my experience, Quality is often get less priority when there is Lack of management focus, inadequate staffing, poor estimation and tracking and shifting priorities to deliver. Following are the proven techniques/methods to improve process and product quality. 1) Org. and Contractual goals on development process maturity and product quality 2) Release approval based on process & product quality KPI's 3) Periodical Org. & Customer leadership reviews to track the fulfilment quality goals 4)Rigorous usage of Defintion of Done (DOD) 5) Audit/assessment of the project using IATF/ISO 9000 and ASPICE standards 6) CI/CD gates for each test steps with stringent KPI's

Well established and applied risk management process will secure fulfilment of project goals. Following are best practices in risk management: 1) Risks should be continuously identified in every stage of project. Requirement reviews, Project reviews, Audits, FMEA, Testing and brainstorming will help to identify risks. 2) Ensure that you don't treat issues as risks. Issue and risks requirement different treatment. 3) Risks should be analysed based on likelihood and impact. Ensure the scale of likelihood and impact is reflecting the project / org. context. 4) Apply risk management with layered approach. Distinguish risks which require project level tracking and org. level tracking. 5) Ensure risks are reported in the project reports.

Lack of well defined system architecture and detailed design including interface specifications is a major cause of late identification of integration issues, bugs and poor performing software. Magic grid based approach for Systems and Software architecture definition for static structure and dynamic behavior with below artifacts is key before taking up implementation. 1. Deployment diagram and package details 2. Usecase and sequence diagrams 3. SBD with interface definitions

While the above listed causes are the major reasons for the most common software development process failures, I would like to bring in the project management process as well. Improper planning and inadequate tracking failed most projects. remember project execution is not one man exercise and finished within a short span of time. Today projects are super complex and distributed. it requires strong project management process. Process models like CMMI & ASPICE and Agile methods like SAFe will provide the best guidance for project management.