1) The time scales are long - in my experience big project failures are on a >5 year time scale (because - big) I think proper studies will need to run >10 years, and that's a big ask for any academic or team.
2) The costs are borne by one set of stakeholders (IT) the benefits are accrued by another (next IT). Why invest to help your successor? No one is going to thank you, also you will likely be sacked faster! There is no board level education or knowledge about this. The only source of information that could convince boards that this is the right thing to do would be Mckinsey/Bain/BCM and those &&^^"! will never, every say this because it's the right thing to do and they are evil. (prove me wrong!)
3) What do you measure? The field is immature, it's not clear what the right inputs to check are - or what the right way to estimate the outputs are. So we need to do a lot of work now to set up the definitive studies.
I have an anecdote : there is a thing called The FEAST hypothesis http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/work/papers/feast1.pdf I was a user of one of the studied systems, and I was curious about the study. I discovered that it hypothesised that development of big systems slowed as they got more complex and the data from the system I used was one of the points that confirmed this. I examined change control documents and discovered that the development of said system had* slowed before the end of the study, but then it had reaccelerated, a whole load of "robots" had been implemented by business units consuming the system and these had not been reported in the FEAST study (IT was largely unaware) the robots started causing problems, policy changed, they were insourced, on platform development took off.
We need
- 5 year major international project to develop the art to support this
- legislation that mandates system development information is stored up front and in a shared place.
- legislation that mandates regular reviews that determine certain information that is signed off by an engineer.
- 20 year massive project to use above information
I am not optimistic.. We can't even prove that XYZ better than agile..
But... there are three key problems.
1) The time scales are long - in my experience big project failures are on a >5 year time scale (because - big) I think proper studies will need to run >10 years, and that's a big ask for any academic or team.
2) The costs are borne by one set of stakeholders (IT) the benefits are accrued by another (next IT). Why invest to help your successor? No one is going to thank you, also you will likely be sacked faster! There is no board level education or knowledge about this. The only source of information that could convince boards that this is the right thing to do would be Mckinsey/Bain/BCM and those &&^^"! will never, every say this because it's the right thing to do and they are evil. (prove me wrong!)
3) What do you measure? The field is immature, it's not clear what the right inputs to check are - or what the right way to estimate the outputs are. So we need to do a lot of work now to set up the definitive studies.
I have an anecdote : there is a thing called The FEAST hypothesis http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/work/papers/feast1.pdf I was a user of one of the studied systems, and I was curious about the study. I discovered that it hypothesised that development of big systems slowed as they got more complex and the data from the system I used was one of the points that confirmed this. I examined change control documents and discovered that the development of said system had* slowed before the end of the study, but then it had reaccelerated, a whole load of "robots" had been implemented by business units consuming the system and these had not been reported in the FEAST study (IT was largely unaware) the robots started causing problems, policy changed, they were insourced, on platform development took off.
We need
- 5 year major international project to develop the art to support this - legislation that mandates system development information is stored up front and in a shared place. - legislation that mandates regular reviews that determine certain information that is signed off by an engineer. - 20 year massive project to use above information
I am not optimistic.. We can't even prove that XYZ better than agile..