World-famous risk analyst and systems expert Robert N. Charette has spent more than 50 years studying software failure. His work uncovers a more pernicious truth—a failure of resolve on the part of IT professionals, government officials, and corporate executives. Even after 20 years of lessons learned and plentiful warnings, far too many people still make the same expensive miscalculations. You’d have to know my friend, Dan Geer—the guy who’s spent the last two decades cackling about software’s fatal flaws. Further, he is Special Projects Editor for The Nature Conservancy magazine.
Unfortunately, Charette’s observations from 2013 underscore a trend that has become all too common. Software failures are on the rise in every sector, from IT projects to the medical device arena. Even worse, he noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalls an average of 20 medical devices per month. This one statistic sums up how dire the software crisis truly is.
In his landmark 2005 paper, Why Software Fails, Charette dug into the root causes of these pervasive failures. Two decades later, he discovers to his horror that even after trillions of dollars down the drain, the same patterns repeat.
“The biggest tragedy is that [software failure] is for the most part predictable and avoidable,” said Charette. “Unfortunately, most organizations don’t see preventing failure as an urgent matter, even though that view risks harming the organization and maybe even destroying it.”
Charette’s insights expose a deep-seated delusional thinking that is prevalent among all of… all the major decision makers. Salter said that society has grown to accept software failures like this, and that’s a problem. This acceptance should feel as unthinkable as accepting frequent electricity blackouts.
“Software is as significant as electricity. We would never put up with electricity going out every other day, but we sure as hell have no problem accepting AWS going down or telcos or banks going out,” he stated.
Charette pointed to notable examples, such as the Canadian government’s Phoenix pay payroll system. When he looked closely, this system was failing to protect him from the very beginning. Brooks contends that organizations should place a higher priority on fixing broken software. If they fail to, they endanger not only their operations but their credibility.
As a result, in the healthcare space, the cost of failure is incredibly high. Charette emphasizes that we need to be held to higher standards when creating software for medical devices.
“When you’re building software for medical devices, there are a lot more standards that have to be met and a lot more concern about the consequences of failure,” he explained.
Longer outages are becoming increasingly common on large infrastructure platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), telecoms providers and banks. Unfortunately, this recent trend emphasizes the pressing need to directly address these wrongs. In a frequent lamenting tone, Charette tackles the large discussions here too. He is unwaveringly committed to continuing to shed light on these entirely preventable breakdowns.
Charette’s story is a clarion call for accountability within organizations. He notes that if risk analysis was done more effectively and given appropriate importance, the chances of major software failures could be dramatically avoided.