Blowing the Whistle: The IT Accounting Scam

Computerworld - Call me a traitor, but it's time to expose one of the largest, longest-running IT scams going.

I uncovered it while trying to solve a mystery. If it is really true that the later in the software life cycle a defect is discovered the more expensive it is to fix by orders of magnitude -- a $1 requirements issue balloons to $1,000 if found in production -- then why doesn't anyone actually behave as if it is true?

With all of the focus on cost-cutting and containment, you would think that IT departments would be scrambling to reduce their software development costs by multiples by improving their processes. Instead, cutting corners has never been more rampant. I've been in the software business for 20 years and it's like we have industry dementia: Software development practices in corporate IT are regressing.

The mystery is why. Did all of the studies get it wrong? Is it actually cheaper and faster to fix problems in the field? Of course not. So why does management regularly make short-term decisions that save time now and spend 1,000 times as much later? Because they can get away with it.

There is an accounting loophole in IT big enough to hide huge mistakes, and it works like this: In most large corporate IT shops, software development resources are divided into two broad categories: development and maintenance. Development includes new applications or new functionality and is typically managed through projects. A project is formed for a particular task, and when it is complete, the software is promoted into production, and responsibility for it is transferred to the maintenance group.

Maintenance is a catch-all name that might also be called "sustaining" or "production support" or a number of other titles, but in a nutshell this group is responsible for keeping the lights on in production. That means they inherit the problems created when corners were cut during the development project because developers were trying to meet an unreasonable deadline.

So the original project group makes its deadline on time and within budget, declares victory, promotes the software into production and collects their manager business-objective bonuses. Everyone in development is happy and moves to the next project. But because the project group met its deadline by throwing discipline to the wind, the maintenance group inherits a tar baby that grabs hold of resources that were already taxed to the max. It's no surprise that the typical maintenance budget is now 60% to 80% of all of IT and growing.

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