Barry Boehm: Project

“Agile development methodologies promise higher customer satisfaction, lower defect rates, faster development times and a solution to rapidly changing requirements. Plan-driven approaches promise predictability, stability, and high assurance. However, both approaches have shortcomings that, if left unaddressed, can lead to project failure. The challenge is to balance the two approaches to take advantage of their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.”

Barry Boehm

Barry Boehm and Richard Turner. " Observations on balancing discipline and agility http://people.cs.aau.dk/~jeremy/SOE2011/resources/Boehm.pdf." Agile Development Conference, 2003. ADC 2003. Proceedings of the. IEEE, 2003.

Failure , Change , Time

“Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. Particularly on large projects, each of the following mismanagement actions has often been responsible for doubling software development costs.”

Barry Boehm

Barry Boehm (1981) as cited in: Tyson Gill (2002) Planning Smarter: Creating Blueprint-Quality Software Specifications. p. 14

“Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S. S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project.”

Barry Boehm

Source: Software risk management: principles and practices (1991), p. 32

“Most post-mortems of these software disaster projects have indicated that their problems would have been avoided or strongly reduced if there had been an explicit early concern with identifying and resolving their high-risk elements. Frequently, these projects were swept along by a tide of optimistic enthusiasm during their early phases, which caused them to miss some clear signals of high risk issues which proved to be the project's downfall later.
Enthusiasm for new software capabilities is a good thing. But it needs to be tempered with a concern for early identification and resolution of a project's high-risk elements, so that people can get these resolved early and then focus their enthusiasm and energy on the positive aspects of their software product.”

Barry Boehm

Source: Software risk management: principles and practices (1991), p. 32

People , Problem

“If a project has not achieved a system architecture, including its rationale, the project should not proceed to full-scale system development. Specifying the architecture as a deliverable enables its use throughout the development and maintenance process.”

Barry Boehm

Barry Boehm (1995); quoted in: L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman (1998) Software Architecture in Practice, Addison Wesley Longman. Chapter 2

“Success in all types of organization depends increasingly on the development of customized software solutions, yet more than half of software projects now in the works will exceed both their schedules and their budgets by more than 50%.”

Barry Boehm

Abstract.
Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II with Cdrom (2000)

Success , Dependency