Theory Driven Modeling as the Core of Software Development

2. Effectiveness And Quality Of Software Engineering Is Low

To improve the understanding of the motivation of this discussion, let us look at the effectiveness and quality of software engineering. Our discussion is grounded on the very important results of the research performed by Capers Jones (2009). Jones and his colleagues from SPR have collected historical data (between 1977 and 2007) from hundreds of corporations and more than 30 government organizations. This historical data is a key source for judging the effectiveness of software process improvement methods. This data is also widely cited in software litigation in cases where the proceedings concern quality, productivity, and schedules.

The main result obtained during the analysis of this historical data can be summarized in one sentence: “The way software is built remains surprisingly primitive” (Jones, 2009, p. 1). This statement is true also nowadays and is based on the following data:

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  Budget and schedule overruns. Even in 2008 majority of software applications are cancelled, overrun their budgets and schedules, and often have hazardously bad quality levels when released. As time passes, the global percentage of programmers performing maintenance on aging software has steadily risen, until it has become the dominant activity of the software world.

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  Product and process innovations. External product innovations (new or improved products) and internal process innovations (new or improved methods for reducing development resources) are at differing levels of sophistication. Even in 2008 very sophisticated and complex pieces of software are still constructed by manual methods with extraordinary labor content (jobs from the United States to India, China, etc.) and very distressing quality levels. Yet software quality and productivity levels in 2007 are hardly different from 1977.

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  Positive and Negative Innovations. Capers Jones and his colleagues have introduced two interesting terms, namely, positive innovations and negative innovations (Jones, 2009). Their meaning is explained on the example of agile techniques. The Agile approaches and eXtreme Programming (XP) were developed to speed up the development of small projects, where small teams working face to face are quite effective. Thus, the Agile approaches are a positive innovation for small projects but sometimes negative for large systems. Moreover, positive innovations tend to become negative innovations in time.