"It upsets me greatly the amount of money wasted in software that never delivers. I don’t buy the excuses that are routinely bandied about for this, which normally boils down to the supplier blaming the customer for changing the requirements. This is rubbish. Suppliers are giving customers the run around. Customers have some blame to shoulder for delegating responsibility on the grounds that IT is ‘too difficult’.

Yes, databases and OO modelling is a specialist subject, but anybody can understand use case models, activity models and screen mockups. That’s all the business people need to understand."

UML takes care of the rest, because we know how to transform these ‘business oriented artifacts’ into code! The other great thing about this method is the user acceptance tests are described upfront. Progress can be measured. Success is defined. Come on customers; stop letting the tail wag the dog. Look into PrinceLite – it really is Prince in name only – and that’s a good thing."