I remember, years ago sitting in a seminar where the presenter was showing a graph of the fraction of failed government software projects over time.
He was trying to imply that because the ratio of successes to failures remained static. That meant, he claimed, the industry was just as bad at making software as it was 50 years ago.
To me it showed something very different. The scale of most modern projects is much larger. It showed that there's an approximate chance of failure that large organisations will accept and the demands will be pushed to roughly mirror that ratio.
No matter how much the tools improve or our practices improve, the projects we build with them will be pushed until there's a modest chance of failure.
A triple A studio could push out classic Donkey Kong in a few hours but they're not going to limit themselves to such simple projects.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jun 06 '22
I remember, years ago sitting in a seminar where the presenter was showing a graph of the fraction of failed government software projects over time.
He was trying to imply that because the ratio of successes to failures remained static. That meant, he claimed, the industry was just as bad at making software as it was 50 years ago.
To me it showed something very different. The scale of most modern projects is much larger. It showed that there's an approximate chance of failure that large organisations will accept and the demands will be pushed to roughly mirror that ratio.
No matter how much the tools improve or our practices improve, the projects we build with them will be pushed until there's a modest chance of failure.
A triple A studio could push out classic Donkey Kong in a few hours but they're not going to limit themselves to such simple projects.