CREATIVE professionals such as graphic designers, artists and even science fiction writers will be required to help develop successful software in the future.
CREATIVE professionals such as graphic designers, artists and even science fiction writers will be required to help develop successful software in the future.That’s according to a new report compiled for the European Commission by Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre, headquartered at the University of Limerick.
The report finds that software has reached what it calls a “Software Crisis 2.0” bottleneck due to an explosion in demand across most industries from medicine and healthcare to automotive and mobile telephony combined with the increased complexity needed to serve these sectors.
The study was commissioned by DG Connect (Directorate-General of Communications Networks, Content and Technology) to address how to maximise the benefit of European software research funding under the €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme.
It quotes research which finds that despite the advances in software such as agile development, management believes that more projects fail now than five or ten years ago. It also claims that almost a third of software projects will be cancelled before completion and over half of those that are completed will cost 189 per cent of their original estimates.
“The fact is that most of today’s successful companies from music and booksellers to taxis and travel are effectively software firms,” said Prof Mike Hinchey of Lero and co-author of the report.
“And the traditional companies which they are overtaking are reverting to becoming software-intensive organisations. This is placing tremendous pressures on the software industry’s ability to deliver.
It is well accepted that Europe will require more software professionals to cope with this explosive demand and complexity. But such is the widespread application of software today across all sectors that we will need input from creatives in the visual and written arts in order to help develop software that can be understood and implemented by end users.”
by Alan Jacques
