Best Practices for Software Development Projects [1] again outlines 10 best-practices for SD projects... and more than 80% of SD projects are unsuccessful -- either because they are over budget, late, missing functions or a combination of all three. Moreover, 30% of software projects are so poorly executed that they are canceled before completion.

The Top-3 rules speak for themselves:

• Recruit skilled and experienced people.
• Use "leading-edge," not "bleeding-edge," technology
• Use the appropriate development process ... - The nature of modern software projects demands a spiral-based development process.

A spiral process has multiple phases that successively decrease the project risk. At the end of each phase is a go or no-go decision. In the early phases, prototyping is used to explore new technologies for the team or a user interface.

Well, we've been talking the whole day with customer's project manager and senior manager about exactly these topics - and fortunately they agreed with us.