Avoidable Software Failures Cost Trillions

Talking to Robert N. Charette can be pretty depressing. Charette, who has been writing about software failures for this magazine for the past 20 years, is a renowned risk analyst and systems expert who over the course of a 50-year career has seen more than his share of delusional thinking among IT professionals, government officials, and corporate executives, before, during, and after massive software failures.

In 2005’s “Why Software Fails,” in IEEE Spectrum, a seminal article documenting the…