PPT Slide
Chpt 7: Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail
Originally, the people of Babel spoke the same language and they were all united.
Therefore, they were successful in initiating and implementing the Tower of Babel to reach God.
However, later, God made them speak different languages and the project failed!
The Tower of Babel failed not because of technological limitations or lack of resources. It failed because of communication problems and disorganization that followed because of lack of communication.
The same problem can be applied to large software engineering projects. Many large system programs fail because of communication problems among the programmers and among the implementers.
How does one cope with the communication problem?
Besides telephone calls, meetings, E-mail and other forms of communication, keeping a workbook for the project is extremely important.
The workbook essentially contains all the documentation relevant to the project (Objectives, External Spec's, Internal Spec's, etc.).
It especially contains documentation about the changes made to the project as the project progresses.