Staying the Course as a CIO: How to Overcome the Trials and Challenges of IT Leadership

CHAPTER 3 Seriously Shaky Software

“We dream of it, then we try to write it – and all hell breaks loose.”

(Scott Rosenberd)

You might be familiar with the term “the devil is in the details”, a phrase often attributed to the catchily named German-born architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). While details are almost certainly important to people who like detail, the statement unfortunately cannot be true. This is because as every code developer knows, the devil isn't in the detail. He has made his home in software, the digital incarnation of hell. And the stuff he gets up to in there is completely without mercy. Indeed, if you do not apply superhuman levels of professional care, then software will quickly turn sour and then begin to fester. From there it doesn't take much more before things begin to degenerate into a full-blown septic-shock horror nightmare after which the prognosis for the patient is pretty bleak.

How do we know this? Well, to be fair, the evidence is purely circumstantial—which is pretty much the way things go when it comes to deities, even fallen ones. But let's see how it all stacks up.

First of all, if we take a look around the IT world, we can see that hardware, in stark contrast to software, works really well. To be honest, you'd be hard pressed to find any evil-ness at all in the pure world of plastic and silicon. The degree of advanced, atomic-level engineering that has to be achieved in order to make a computer work never fails to impress ...