Job Performance and Technology

I've found the following figures, which describes a terrible picture of what is happening on the tech scene. One should be noted that it is may be half of the truth. However it should make us think about the software development processes and the quality of the proffessionals...

"52% of all innovative projects fail and 31% percent of these projects are canceled before producing a single deliverable (Kapur, 1997)."

"On average, professional coders make 100 to 150 errors in every thousand lines of code they write, according to a multiyear study of 13,000 programs by Humphrey of Carnegie Mellon" and although "(s)ystems testing goes on for about half the process and even when they finally get it to work, there is still no design" (Mann, 2002)."

"In the last 15 years alone, software defects have wrecked a ($500 billion) European satellite launch, delayed the opening of the hugely expensive Denver airport for a year, destroyed a NASA Mars mission, killed four marines in a helicopter crash, induced a U.S. Navy ship to destroy a civilian airliner and shut down ambulance systems in London, leading to as many as 30 deaths" while the I Love You virus enabled by Microsoft's decision to allow Outlook to easily run programs in e-mail attachments cost $8.74 billion according to consulting firm Computer Economics (Mann, 2002).

"According to a study by the Standish Group' software projects often devote 80 percent of their budgets to repairing flaws they themselves produced a figure that does not include the even more costly process of furnishing product support and development patches for problems found after the release" (Mann, 2002)."