It is NOT only code

We recently failed in our product. The 6 persons effort for nearly 2 years went into nothing. Besides we had all kind of testing, functional, unit, integrations, load test, stress test etc, to protect the application from any kind of questioning. When the management and product team took a decision about scraping the product, the scrum team was awestruck. Soon all water cooler conversations were only about this. Team retrospected a lot about what has just happened and discussed everything under the sun that could have been better. Below are few pointers from that.

Projects and products do fail

Software industry exists and continues to get better just because someone is continuing to write good/better code and solving problems. If we see the history of this industry, we just had assembly language, then we created abstractions after abstractions and OOPS, functional etc. As we progressed and got better, our ability to focus on the primary objective seems to be lost ie Problem solving. So when software “just don’t work, get scrapped“. This is what most developers conclude when project get scraped.

Stakeholders need to be happy

A projects need support and buy-in from all part of the organization. This includes marketing, management, product org, and of-course the customers. Each of them have a role to play in-order to successfully deliver the product the to customer. When one of them does not align to the vision and mission of the Product, it will ultimately fail.

When People change, alignment also changes.

Lot many times, when senior management changes, the whole mission of the company or division also changes drastically. This might be because they bring a new perspective, ideas and ways of doing things.

Competing products

Product acquisition and market reaction to a new products can cause products to be abandoned. Its often survival of the fittest. As a developer, Competition is healthy when it does not affect my product drastically. But unfortunately, businesses can not function like that. Ultimately, the product which the customer wants the most wins.

Great products may not sell

Developers often think we need to build a great product in-order to capture the market and excite the customer. Great products also need great sales people to sell them.

Timing

Its all about timing!. One of my friend told me an example of touch-based Windows mobile which was available very long before iPhones and Android dominated the mobile industry. Even though the product was good, there were lots of timing issues the market was not ready, Touch was not affordable etc.

SO on and On

There are various reasons because of which leads to a failed software project. I have listed some of them here, But the list is infinite. And of-course Code is one of them.