I was cleaning up some stacks of files on my desk last night. In a pile from my previous job, I found some notes taken during a CSIA event where a gentleman from Forrester Research was moderating. My recollection is that this event was about September last year.
Anyway, here are a couple of interesting nuggets I wrote in my notes:
Between 70-75% of all IT projects fail regardless where they are delivered. Outsourcing and off-shoring have not significantly changed the success rate. The 70-75% failure rate has not changed in 20 years, even though billions of dollars are spent every year on project management software.
$50 billion was spent on storage in 2007, and about $26 billion of that was wasted.
Applying Lean Manufacturing techniques and philosophies to IT, Forrester has seen about 60% reduction in application development costs. Lean concepts are much broader than Agile methodologies, but they are related.
Open Source software passed all other models for software in revenue in 2007. Open Source is not free, and it has approximately the same amount of bugs as Microsoft software, but the support is much better. I thought his next comment was so funny that I wrote it down with quotes, “You pretend to get help with Microsoft”. If I remember correctly, the whole room burst out in laughter. Except the 4 MS consultants in the front row…
Open Source applications have gotten very good in the last 18 months because of better feedback and better giveback. The apps are more modular. And the most important factor in the quality is that developers are active and work on what they like to do (their passion translates to quality).
At HCL, 30-40% of all application development is using open source.
Big players are getting on board. IBM is a huge proponent. Sun bought MySQL. Google sponsors open source. Open source is not a fad. That is why Microsoft considers open source and Google the top enemies.
That’s about all I found worthy of posting. Hope you find this as interesting as I did.
No mention of load testing during this event at all.