The Trouble With Software (and what to do about it)

The purpose of this site is to gather comments, gripes, insights, and complaints about the difficulty of implementing, using, managing, and coping with business software applications in the real world.

For the past 25 years I have consulted with direct commerce companies in specifying, selecting, and implementing order management and fulfillment applications, along with eCommerce and database marketing solutions. In the last ten years, the job has become increasingly difficult because of what I perceive to be a growing gap between what users expect of systems and what they are actually able to provide. It is a stubborn fact-of-life that all users struggle with, and which I can only imagine is equally frustrating on the development side.

As Charles C. Mann wrote five years ago, "many software engineers believe that software quality is not improving. If anything, they say, it's getting worse."

But this is more than misery seeking company. The comments and input gathered here will eventually make their way into a monograph on the subject. I invite your frank comments and contributions. If you wish to participate anonymously, that's fine. If you identify yourself, I will confirm with you what I may publish as a result of this fact-finding mission. But either way, please share with us your horror stories about systems that hope to be enabling solutions and turn out to be quite the opposite. And thank you in advance for your participation.

I have set up "Categories" for you to respond to in an effort to bring some order to impending chaos. But being sensitive to the limitation of categories (as any developer has long since learned to be...), I have included some generic categories for input that doesn't fit well anywhere else. Select "General Overview" for some of my own very general comments on the subject.

Ernie Schell, Director, Marketing Systems Analysis, a div. of Systems Consulting International, LLC