A common theme throughout this book has been a focus on building software in small manageable chunks so that we can deliver incrementally and gather feedback as we go. We discussed adaptive planning and how this compares to traditional project predictive planning back in Chapter 1, The Software Industry and the Agile Manifesto. In particular, we talked about estimates in the software industry and how difficult they were to get right when used to predictively plan large pieces of work.
The Standish Group's Chaos report is an annual report which looks at the state of the software industry. In 2015, it looked at over 50,000 software projects worldwide and assessed them based on their ability to deliver on time, to budget, and to obtain a satisfactory outcome. Based on this criteria, only 29% of projects were successful. Of the rest, the ones that failed outright...