Software Projects failure for a variety of reasons, of which perhaps the most frequent is that the system developers fail to meet the explicit or implicit requirements of the project.

The seeds of many a software project's failure are sown during the early days of that project, long before any of the people are even thinking about the possibility of failure—indeed, that might be the reasons behind the seeds being sown so early in the project.

One of the more frequent problems associated with a failed software development is that nobody knows what the finished software will really be like. Those that understand the commercial application of the software are not usually computer programmers, and therefore have an intuitive understanding at a level that may lack all of the necessary detail required to create a computer system.

Those that create the computer system—the system designers and programmers have their hands full dealing with the myriad of details required to create the computer system and often do not share the intuitive understanding of the business in which the system will be placed.

The tasks of creating a working computer system requires a detailed specification of the real-world problems to be solved at a very detailed level. The logic of the program cannot be left "hanging" where there some particular as-yet-unthought of condition is encountered—to do so is to invite disaster. Therefore the systems designer attempts to think into all possible scenarios. The programmer, in turn, then tries to write a textual description of the computer processing that must be effected to bring about the required result.