Software Failures and IT Management’s Repeated Mistakes

“Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen?”

KGB Chairman Charkov’s question to inorganic chemist Valery Legasov in HBO’s “Chernobyl” miniseries makes a good epitaph for the hundreds of software development, modernization, and operational failures I have covered for IEEE Spectrum since my first contribution, to its September 2005 special issue on learning—or rather, not learning—from software failures. I noted then, and it’s still true two decades later: Software failures…