It’s always baffling when you see a company—well-funded, packed with smart people—consistently struggling to deliver software effectively. We’re not talking about under-resourced startups here; these are established organisations that somehow keep making the same mistakes.
After decades of repeated software failures, you’d think companies would have learned by now. You’d think that after reading The Mythical Man-Month (1975), Peopleware (1987), The Phoenix Project (2013), and countless other books dissecting why software projects fail, companies would start listening.
Software engineering has been around for decades, yet many companies still manage to do it badly. Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man-Month nearly 50 years ago, warning of the pitfalls of software development. Yet the same mistakes he outlined are repeated daily in companies across the world.