Best Practices for Software Development Projects again outlines 10 best-practices for SD projects… and more than 80% of SD projects are unsuccessful — either because they are over budget, late, missing functions or a combination of all three. Moreover, 30% of software projects are so poorly executed that they are canceled before completion.
The Top-3 rules speak for themselves:
- Recruit skilled and experienced people.
- Use "leading-edge," not "bleeding-edge," technology
- Use the appropriate development process … – The nature of modern software projects demands a spiral-based development process.
A spiral process has multiple phases that successively decrease the project risk. At the end of each phase is a go or no-go decision. In the early phases, prototyping is used to explore new technologies for the team or a user interface.
Well, we've been talking the whole day with customer's project manager and senior manager about exactly these topics – and fortunately they agreed with us.