Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of New York City Book

The author stated that a lot of software engineering projects end up in failure and that this won't change much in the future. It's good to know why projects fail and how to lower the risk of failure. However, it's good to know that there are no silver bullets.

Typically, to improve the chances of success, it's not crucial to care about tools or particular technology. Often even financial bonuses to employees will not help (with the exception of avoiding takeovers from competition). What is more important is limiting the scope of the product, negotiating requirements (a lot of them can be relaxed or even rejected) and deadlines, caring about hiring right people, organizing frequent demos for customers and assuring daily and reliable project builds. (Of course, there are much more topics that are important).