Xmas Special: Software Industry Transformation - Why Software Development Must Mature With Vasco Duarte

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Xmas Special: Software Industry Transformation - Why Software Development Must Mature

Welcome to the 2025 Xmas special - a five-episode deep dive into how software as an industry needs to transform. In this opening episode, we explore the fundamental disconnect between how we manage software and what software actually is. From small businesses to global infrastructure, software has become the backbone of modern society, yet we continue to manage it with tools designed for building ships in the 1800s. This episode sets the stage for understanding why software development must evolve into a mature discipline.

Software Runs Everything Now

"Without any single piece, I couldn't operate - and I'm tiny. Scale this reality up: software isn't just in tech companies anymore."

Even the smallest businesses today run entirely on software infrastructure. A small consulting and media business depends on WordPress for websites, Kajabi for courses, Stripe for payments, Quaderno for accounting, plus email, calendar, CRM systems, and AI assistants for content creation. The challenge? We're managing this critical infrastructure with tools designed for building physical structures with fixed requirements - an approach that fundamentally misunderstands what software is and how it evolves. This disconnect has to change.

The Oscillation Between Technology and Process

"AI amplifies our ability to create software, but doesn't solve the fundamental process problems of maintaining, evolving, and enhancing that software over its lifetime."

Software improvement follows a predictable pattern: technology leaps forward, then processes must adapt to manage the new complexity. In the 1960s-70s, we moved from machine code to COBOL and Fortran, which was revolutionary but led to the "software crisis" when we couldn't manage the resulting complexity. This eventually drove us toward structured programming and object-oriented programming as process responses, which, in turn, resulted in technology changes!

Today, AI tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude make writing code absurdly easy - but writing code was never the hard part. Robert Glass documents in "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" that maintenance typically consumes between 40 and 80 percent of software costs, making "maintenance" probably the most important life cycle phase. We're overdue for a process evolution that addresses the real challenge: maintaining, evolving, and enhancing software over its lifetime.

Software Creates An Expanding Possibility Space

"If they'd treated it like a construction project ('ship v1.0 and we're done'), it would never have reached that value."

Traditional project management assumes fixed scope, known solutions, and a definable "done" state. The Sydney Opera House exemplifies this: designed in 1957, completed in 1973, ten times over budget, with the architect resigning - but once built, it stands with "minimal" (compared to initial cost) maintenance. Software operates fundamentally differently. Slack started as an internal tool for a failed gaming company called Glitch in 2013. When the game failed, they noticed their communication tool was special and pivoted entirely. After launching in 2014, Slack continuously evolved based on user feedback: adding threads in 2017, calls in 2016, workflow builder in 2019, and Canvas in 2023. Each addition changed what was possible in organizational communication. In 2021, Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion precisely because it kept evolving with user needs. The key difference is that software creates possibility space that didn't exist before, and that space keeps expanding through continuous evolution.

Software Is Societal Infrastructure

"This wasn't a cyber attack - it was a software update gone wrong."

Software has become essential societal infrastructure, not optional and not just for tech companies. In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million Windows computers globally. Airlines grounded flights, hospitals canceled surgeries, banks couldn't process transactions, and 911 services went down. The global cost exceeded $10 billion. This wasn't an attack - it was a routine update that failed catastrophically. AWS outages in 2021 and 2023 took down major portions of the internet, stopping Netflix, Disney+, Robinhood, and Ring doorbells from working. CloudFlare outages similarly cascaded across daily-use services. When software fails, society fails. We cannot keep managing something this critical with tools designed for building physical things with fixed requirements. Project management was brilliant for its era, but that era isn't this one.

The Path Ahead: Four Critical Challenges

"The software industry doesn't just need better tools - it needs to become a mature discipline."

This five-episode series will address how we mature as an industry by facing four critical challenges:

Episode 2: The Project Management Trap - Why we think in terms of projects, dates, scope, and "done" when software is never done, and how this mindset prevents us from treating software as a living capability
Episode 3: What's Already Working - The better approaches we've already discovered, including iterative delivery, feedback loops, and continuous improvement, with real examples of companies doing this well
Episode 4: The Organizational Immune System - Why better approaches aren't universal, how organizations unconsciously resist what would help them, and the hidden forces preventing adoption
Episode 5: Software-Native Organizations - What it means to truly be a software-native organization, transforming how the business thinks, not just using agile on teams

Software is too important to our society to keep getting it wrong. We have much of the knowledge we need - the challenge is adoption and evolution. Over the next four episodes, we'll build this case together, starting with understanding why we keep falling into the same trap.

References For Further Reading

Glass, Robert L. "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" - Fact 41, page 115
CrowdStrike incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident
AWS outages: 2021 (Dec 7), 2023 (June 13), and November 2025 incidents
CloudFlare outages: 2022 (June 21), and November 2025 major incident
Slack history and Salesforce acquisition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)
Sydney Opera House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House

About Vasco Duarte

Vasco Duarte is a thought leader in the Agile space, co-founder of Agile Finland, and host of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, which has over 10 million downloads. Author of NoEstimates: How To Measure Project Progress Without Estimating, Vasco is a sought-after speaker and consultant helping organizations embrace Agile practices to achieve business success.

You can link with Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn.

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