corollary

Listening to:

Puccini, La Bohème.

Holiday reading:

Robert L. Glass, Software runaways.

I read this in Australia because it was in a friend’s book-case, not because I took it with me. It’s a repackaged collection of articles, including a big chunk of someone else’s masters thesis, about software projects that went disastrously wrong, usually costing the earth, and/or taking much longer than expected to finish, or not finishing at all.

As a collection, it doesn’t hold together particularly well. The introduction is OK in terms of introducing Glass’s theories about project failure, but the rest of the book makes pretty dull reading. Many of the failures were due to political squabbles (rather than bad technical decisions), but there’s nothing much in the way of human interest in the presentation of these stories. Further, the technical problems are not described in anything like enough detail to allow anyone to take away any sort of technical lessons.