Challenges

This website contains information that will enable its users to successfully meet the following challenges:

• Business Engineering:
  • Businesses are rarely engineered.
  • Business processes are obsolete or inappropriate.
  • Businesses are often poorly or inappropriately organized.
  • Businesses have difficulties introducing new information technology that could enable new applications that can improve the way the businesses do business.
  • Businesses are information-intensive and require numerous applications to support their business processes.
  • Businesses have difficulties selecting and prioritizing new applications.
• Development Organization:
  • Development organizations are not implementing the best industry practices and are sometimes even implementing known worst practices.
  • Development organizations are improperly implementing best industry practices.
  • Development processes are not properly specified and communicated to those who will use them.
• System Development, Usage, and Retirement:
  • Systems typically contain large amounts of software, which is intrinsically intangible, abstract, and complex.
  • Software-intensive systems are often highly complex due to both intrinsic and accidental complexity.
  • Software-intensive systems are expensive to develop and maintain.
  • Software-intensive systems requirements often do not meet customer goals.
  • Software-intensive systems are typically delivered:
    • Behind schedule.
    • With large cost overruns.
    • With less capabilities than promised or expected.
    • With inadequate or obsolete documentation.
    • That are neither reliable nor robust.
  • Some 25% - 33% of software applications are never delivered at all.
  • Software-intensive systems are often difficult to:
    • Develop.
    • Extend to meet new requirements.
    • Integrate with legacy applications and databases.
    • Port to new environments (e.g., the Web, n-tier client/server).
    • Use.
  • Maintenance is often complex and error-prone.