Software development is an often complex affair, beset by a multitude of difficulties ranging from talentless developers, feature bloat, stakeholder politics and poor planning.

The following cartoon, by Alex Gorbatchev, is a modern take on an old, yet still relevant, problem; the reasons for software engineering failures.

Designing systems today is difficult because there is no consensus on what the problems are, let alone how to resolve them.

Software engineering is often used to solve complex problems, problems where it’s impossible to visualise all the difficulties you’ll run into without actually building the software. This has led to what is known as Wicked Problems. In other words, writing code doesn’t kill projects, too much planning, too much functionality and too many stakeholders do!

Wicked problems arise when an organization must deal with something new, with change, and when multiple stakeholders have different ideas about how the change should take place.

Every wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem.

The article goes on to recommend the iterative development process, first proposed by Takeuchi and Nonaka in “The New New Product Development Game” called Scrum. An iterative, as opposed to a Waterfall, process is clearly a step in the right direction. The customer really needed a simple tyre swing but couldn’t articulate that in a meaningful way. Since we’re software developers, not Zen Masters, an answer is to quickly develop a solution in for the customer and keep evolving that solution based on real usage. That way, we can get from the plank to the tyre swing without the need for the roller-coaster ride of complication.