Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com.
From the article by Jordan Golson over at Verge: The complaint, filed in California Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, alleges that Anderson attempted to recruit at least 12 Tesla engineers to a new self-driving venture that he and Urmson were starting, in violation of Anderson’s non-solicitation agreement, and that Anderson took confidential Tesla information […]
A few years ago, I posted about the Air Force’s abandoned $1 billion effort to consolidate all its many accounting systems. Now it appears the State of California is going through similar difficulties: State officials have failed to remedy problems that have contributed to a two-year delay for a new computer system and cost increases […]
From 2011 to 2013, I served as an expert witness in BanxCorp d/b/a BanxQuote v. Costco Wholesale Corporation et al., a copyright infringement case in the US District Court, Southern District of New York. To quote from the summary judgment opinion issued in this case by Judge Kenneth M. Karas (note — I have omitted […]
I’ve written twice before (here and here) about the severe problems with the British government’s Universal Credit project. From my first post: The British government has spent roughly half a billion pounds ($750M) developing a new IT system for its welfare services, with the goal of cutting down on fraud and loss. The project, by all accounts, has […]
The following excerpt is taken — with a few minor edits — from a white paper I wrote on quality assurance back in the late 1990s for a large corporate client. Given the rather intense coverage of the failings of the Healthcare.gov website — which clearly was not ready for prime time — I thought […]
Classic patterns in disputed IT project: Hertz v. Accenture
Just ran across this article at the always-irreverent-but-usually-spot-on Register, an IT news site out of England. The standard patterns of a troubled IT project are so evident in this one report that I may well use it as a case study for my CS 428 (“Real-world software engineering”) class this fall. Here are some of […]
Neverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget
A story a few days ago caught my eye, not because it was unusual, but because it follows so familiar a pattern. Here are a few excerpts from the article: MANATEE — Late nights, hefty contracts and humming computers are a norm in the district’s School Support Center, where employees are working to fix a […]
Minnesota DMV software project: Faulty Towers/Neverending Story patterns
In my 2000 white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: System Failure (1976-2000)” [PDF], which I researched and wrote while at PricewaterhouseCoopers, I describe six broad fact patterns to classify the types of software system implementation failure. One of those patterns I named “Faulty Towers”: The client buys the system from [or has the system developed […]
![The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]](http://bfwa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/intel-cpu-150x150.jpg "The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]")
Back in 2000, PricewaterhouseCooper published my research white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF). This paper reflected research I and my staff had done over several months on roughly 120 two- or three-party lawsuits involving information technology. I found that almost all of these lawsuits fell into one or two of six […]