Unique Insight:

UCSoft holds unique insight into software and software development process. This insight comes from three sources:

• First hand data from a decade’s experience in the field on all aspects of software application development projects large or small, government or commercial;
• A decade theoretical research in complexity theory, systems thinking, biology of cognition, methodology of deductive science, foundational logic, organizational theory, and philosophy of technology to analyze the nature of business, software, and software development processes;
• In-depth study in engineering history, philosophy, logic and generic engineering design to understand the criteria for success shared by all branches of engineering.

This insight provides the confidence in understanding why software engineering is still a fallacy and how to bridge the gap to make software engineering as successful as conventional engineering. Using ideas from complexity theory, systems thinking and scientific method, UCSoft invented CbyP, a scientific method to construct scientific theories. With CbyP, software development becomes systematic theory construction and transformation whereby developing software becomes a systematic, disciplined practice rather than ad hoc and experience based guesswork. Scientific theory has three properties: consistency, completeness, and independence. By creating customer, business, and system domain knowledge in form of scientific theories, all development documentations such as customer needs, business processes, user requirements, and design automatically possess the three mentioned properties. Resultantly, business stakeholder can communicate their business needs and IT workers can communicate their delivery precisely impossible otherwise. Accordingly, organizations have the capability to build software systems that are long lasting, extensible, and interoperable. Thanks to CbyP, organizations can now develop and implement software projects better, faster, and cheaper than ever before.

Breakthrough Results:

The software project success rate has steadily increased, from 16% in 1994 to 34% in 2004, according to Standish. The improvement is about 1.7% a year and appears to be linear, based on this small sample of data. The gradual improvement over the years is due to technology advances that have resulted an increase in developers’ productivity. But in terms of progress in the understanding of the inherent abstract nature of software, the requirements definition and representation, there is none. Resultantly, difficulties remain with scoping and structuring ill-structured problem space due to issues of problem representation and visualization. Accordingly errors in requirements contribute to a consistent, absolute project failure rate that can’t be reduced. A ceiling such as 50% success rate may exist.  The only way to break the ceiling and to reach a sudden success rate of 90% or higher is through disruptive innovation in requirements engineering. Throughout the history of software industry, there has been no change in meeting requirements challenge. Requirements definition and elicitation methods remain the same whereby ambiguous, incomplete, and contradictory requirements persist. From insight gained through years of research and field experience, UCSoft found its solution to requirements challenge fundamentally. This confidence comes from UCSoft’s research breakthrough that connects theory with practice long missed in software but not in traditional engineering.