Achieving Project success over the last 30 years has been difficult! Reports on various studies released over the last 5 years state as little as 30% of complex projects succeed. Although this number is climbing, very large projects (300 – 500 man years) have been the least successful in succeeding, with one report in 2007 (Sauer, Gemino, Horner Reich) studying 412 projects finding no successful projects of a size greater than 200 man years. So why do we continue to undertake such projects and how can we succeed?

Eating The IT Elephant – Moving From Greenfield Development to Brownfield by Hopkins and Jenkins introduce ‘Brownfield’ as a philosophy for the evolution of legacy projects. They recognize that for the delivery of large complex problems to become repeatable and predictable some fundamental areas of the IT industry have to change.

The book is split into two parts; the first half looks at problems in large projects dealing with extending legacy systems, their failures and lessons learned – Communication and embracing complexity appears to be the biggest issues.

The Second half looks at how an Elephant Eater (a system which can consume and understand all relevant information about a project and its environment) can theoretically be implemented. Herein lies a paradox – the Elephant Eater seems to be such a large project in itself that it is doomed to failure.

That said, a lot of their concepts are very interesting such as Software Archeology, transforming Legacy code and configurations into different views and models. Also, using visual environmental models to pass information to various members of the project at different levels. So high level business overviews for Stakeholders and lower level technical detail for developers/architects. The difference being that these are actually linked, so business elements can be traced through lower levels right to the code if necessary. They even suggest utilizing Second Life for this.

Their experiences of how project managers tackle Change Management and embrace Induced Complexity is reflected in their conclusion that it is not technology that causes most large projects to fail but rather Inconsistency and Ambiguity. When projects are late, the wrong solution most managers turn to is to add more people in a last ditch attempt for success.

A common recurring theme is that there is a lack of experts in the IT industry to understand the external environmental issues and constraints that often derail large projects down the road. One solution they suggest is the ‘Site Visit’ where team members can actually have experience of the current system working to determine any issues that may not be apparent in any requirements received.

The book gives some great examples of Legacy evolving projects failing because Greenfield techniques were used. Most of these failed in the later stages and they conclude that although the solutions were elegant they were solutions to the wrong problem – namely integration failings. From their experiences they introduce the VITA (Views, Inventory, Transforms and Artifacts) Architecture.

There are a few things I would have to question.

The authors seem to believe the IT industry is somewhat mature. I don’t think this is the case at all, in fact I would go as far as saying it is still immature, especially in the development lifecycle, hence few to none of these very large projects succeeding.

One suggestion they refer to a few times is to ‘use your own language’ when discussing problems with team members. I believe that this actually causes more Ambiguity and more formal languages need to be present to evolve our profession.

A suggested approach to Pattern Driven Engineering (PDE) that is built in as part of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a focus of Brownfield Development. This may be fraught with danger as it is becoming recognized that early use of patterns lead to them being used as a complex solution to a simpler problem – Pattern Happy Development. An alternative would be to recognize these patterns in refactoring stages and then apply them to increase the quality of the code.

For a 200 page book there is a lot of interesting and somewhat controversial ideas. I would recommend this book to any project manager or architect working, or have worked on, a large system integrating other Legacy Systems.