| Sumario: | This article asks if the failure of most software projects to meet their goals can be fixed by giving developers better tools. On September 14th, the radios in an air-traffic control centre in Palmdale, California shut down, grounding hundreds of flights in southern California and Nevada, and leading to five mid-air encounters between aircraft unable to talk to the ground controllers. A glitch in the software running the system meant the computers had to be re-booted every 30 days, and somebody forgot to do so. But software running a mission-critical system should not have to be restarted every month. At least Palmdale's software worked some of the time.The same cannot be said of an $4 billion write-off that America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to swallow when a multi-year effort to overhaul its computer system failed completely in 1997. As software has become more and more pervasive in business and government, and more complicated, the impact of poor software design has been steadily growing.
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