There is no solution because these projects are not failing because of technical reasons.

They are failing because of political scheming and bunch of people wanting to have a finger in the pie - "trillions spent" - I guess no one would mind earning couple millions.

Then you have "important people" who want to be important and want to have an opinion on font size and that some button should be 12px to the right because they are "important" it doesn't matter for the project but they have to assert the dominance.

You have 2 or 3 companies working on a project? Great! now they will be throwing stuff over the fence to limit their own cost and blame others while trying to get away with as least work done cashing most money possible.

That is how sausage is made. Coming up with "reasonable approach" is not the solution because as soon as you get different suppliers, different departments you end up with power/money struggle.

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throw0101c 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> They are failing because of political scheming and bunch of people wanting to have a finger in the pie - "trillions spent" - I guess no one would mind earning couple millions.

Not (necessarily) wrong, but if you start small, Important People may not want to bother with something that is Unimportant and may leave things alone so something useful and working can get going. If you starting with an Important project then Important People will start circling it right away.

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munificent 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even starting small isn't a surefire way to avoid that problem. They'll just show up once the thing gets big enough.

Witness how the web was once a funny little collection of nerds sharing stuff with each other. But once it got big enough that you could start making money off it, the important people showed up and started taking over. The web still has those odd little corners, but it's largely the domain of a small number of giant powerful corporations.

I don't think there is a silver bullet for dealing with egomaniacs who want infinite power. They seem to be a part of the human condition and dealing with them is part of the ticket price for having a society.

	▲	camgunz 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dunno if you listen to Ezra Klein but he had an anthropologist on once who described this tribe of humans who when someone came back having bagged big game, they had to run a gauntlet of everyone else downplaying their accomplishment like "that's not that big, your father caught bigger", and "maybe one day you'll bring down an adult deer" etc. The whole idea was like, egomaniacs are pretty bad, and they had a cultural defense against it. I often think a weakness of liberal, western society is the insistence on rationality, that like the hunter in question could just easily put their abilities and accomplishments alongside those of others and get a pretty accurate picture. This is super untrue; we need systems to guard against our frailties, but we can't admit we have them, so we keep falling into the same ditches.

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ozim 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess for me important point is that it is not technical issue and we already have all technical tools/processes to do really big software projects.

Even if people dislike scrum, find Git complicated and don’t want to open up JIRA - these tools are not the problem, these tools help building loads of working software.

We as software engineers with devops can deliver great and complex projects and build great systems. Lots of businesses people don’t even understand how much in control we can be of the environments and code.

Yet developers/IT is there to be blamed. Like we should be ashamed, Uncle Bob will give lectures “how developers should be more professional”.

Yet I always find business people who are like children in the corn field.

With small difference business/sales guys are pushy and walk over engineering guys and engineers bend over and take the blame and business guys can always say “those IT kids playing with toys instead of doing real job”.

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ethbr1 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Political corruption is like environmental radiation: a viable fix is never 'just get rid of political corruption'*. It's an environmental constant that needs to be handled by an effective approach.

That said, parent's size- and scope-iterative approach also helps with corruption, because corruption metastasizes in the time between {specification} and {deliverable}.

Shrink that, by tying incremental payments to working systems at smaller scales, and you shrink the blast radius for failure.

That said, there are myriad other problems the approach creates (encouraging architectures that won't scale to the final system, promoting duct taped features on top of an existing system, vendor-to-vendor transitions if the system builder changes, etc).

But on the whole, the pros outweigh the cons... for projects controlled by a political process (either public or private).

That's why military procurement has essentially landed on spiral development (i.e. iterative demonstrated risk burn-down) as a meta-framework.

* Limit political corruption, to the extent possible in a cost efficient manner, sure

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pksebben 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> There is no solution because these projects are not failing because of technical reasons.

There is no technical solution. There are systems and governance solutions, if the will is there to analyze and implement them.