An earlier post here deal with allegations by Telsa that a former employee had stolen trade-secret information and taken it to a new startup. This latest article has a remarkably similar story, but involving an individual leaving Waymo and joining Uber: Uber has escaped a court order that could have effectively halted its self-driving car program, […]
Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge has posted an absolutely fascinating video showing the interacting trading algorithms that analyzed a newsfeed regarding Radio Shack financing plans and reacted accordingly: News yesterday that Radioshack was planning to seek new debt financing in order to give suppliers more confidence – which in itself is kind of ironic […]
Several years ago, I served as an expert witness in a trade secrets lawsuit involving algorithmic high-speed trading and learned some fascinating things in the process (most of which I can’t talk about). So it was with some interest that I read this article about the market’s near-instantaneous reaction to the Federal Reserve’s decision not […]
Since I’ve been writing a lot about large-scale IT project failures, here’s a story about a troubled-but-completed IT project: the CalPERS re-engineering effort. It’s hard to call it successful when it cost double the original estimate ($586 million vs. $279 million), took over 16 years (it started in 1995 and went live in 2011), […]
Derek Thompson over at the Atlantic has put together a very useful, brief article outlining what has happened at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer’s watch. Most significant is this graph: That tells the story in a nutshell, but go read the whole article — it’s worth it.
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 […]