If there is anything that can come of good of my taxes (a ridiculous amount of it in fact) is that we should educate people on the difficulties of software development. This would make a fantastic case study on what I presume are the issues at hand:
- Maintaining complex code (+1mil LOC)
- Classic "waterfall" approaches to software development (and the inherent problem with trying to blueprint requirements up front)
- The mythical man month[1]
- Change management
Funny thing is...these are all human problems.