Fridays With Bob

# A Mentor Who Helped Us Understand Why Software Projects Fail The editor of IEEE Spectrum describes how Robert Charette became his professional mentor and collaborator, helping readers understand the real-world reasons software projects go wrong—a topic so important that Charette's original article is still being taught in engineering classes today. Over more than two decades of Friday morning conversations and thousands of blog posts, Charette documented lessons from software failures that matter to everyone, since software now runs almost everything in our lives.