************************* The Chaos Report The Chaos Report is the first survey made by the Standish Group. This report is the landmark study of software project failure. It is cited by everybody writing a paper or making a presentation were a reference is made of software project failure. Scope of the Study The respondents to the Standish Group survey were IT executive managers. The sample includes large, medium, and small companies across major industry segments : banking, securities, manufacturing, retail, wholesale, heath care, insurance, services, and local, state, and federal organizations. The total sample size was 365 respondents representing 8,380 applications. In addition, The Standish Group conducted focus groups and personal interviews to provide qualitative context for the survey results. Key Findings The Standish Group research shows a staggering 31.1% of projects will be canceled before they ever get completed. Further results indicate 52.7% of projects will cost over 189% of their original estimates. The cost of these failures and overruns are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The lost opportunity costs are not measurable, but could easily be in the trillions of dollars in the United States alone. Based on this research, The Standish Group estimates that American companies and government agencies will spend $81 billion for canceled software projects. These same organizations will pay an additional $59 billion for software projects that will be completed, but will exceed their original time estimates. The Standish Group estimates that almost 80,000 projects were cancelled.. Risk is always a factor when pushing the technology envelope, but many of these projects were as mundane as a drivers license database, a new accounting package, or an order entry system. On the success side, the average is only 16.2% for software projects that are completed on-time and on-budget. In the larger companies, the news is even worse: only 9% of their projects come in on-time and on-budget. And, even when these projects are completed, many are no more than a mere shadow of their original specification requirements. Projects completed by the largest American companies have only approximately 42% of the originally-proposed features and functions. Smaller companies do much better. A total of 78.4% of their software projects will get deployed with at least 74.2% of their original features and functions. This data may seem disheartening, and in fact it is, 48% of the IT executives in our research sample feel that there are more failures currently than just five years ago. *********************** Upfront <b>design</b> is kinda important especially in financial information systems... cj... __________________ HAVE STOP - WILL TRADE If You Have The Vision We Have The Code
Just my two cents ... I have been a software developer for the last twenty five years. I use several systems I have written in .Net, VB6, Javascript (esignal), etc. Relative to other real time applications I have been involved in over my career, the processing requirements to execute automated trading systems is quite low, even when watching several stocks, indexes, indicators, etc. Most of the original work I have done is in VB6 and I see no need to re-write it to C++, .Net, etc because there is no processing drag if it is coded correctly.
That's true. Most trading systems require what may be defined as a mild form of realtime processing. That said, choosing a language for development is mostly a matter of personal taste. GS
You should check out Trading Blox. The difference from Wealth Lab, Tradestation, Amibroker, Neoticker (and on and on) is that it's all checkboxes, dropdown boxes, sliders etc. So ABSOLUTELY NO PROGRAMMING! If I'm not mistaken it also offers portfolio backtesting. I guess it's geared towards futures trading. It's somewhat expensive, as you need to get the full version, not the first two. It's priced at 3.000 USD. I haven't tried it, so I'm not going to vouch for the quality of the software or it's limitations. You should do your own research, which is always recommended whenever one is dealing with the markets. Also, I've got 20 years of programming behind me, and I definitely understand why you don't want to go to all the trouble of learning some of the scripting languages (although they aren't that difficult to pick up). I am a discretionary trader myself, thus I have yet to program a trading system.