death-march

Am I In A Death March Project?

The facts: The other programmer is constantly slipping deadlines with no status updates, at the moment he is slipping the single biggest feature on the website (which he asked to work on) by 3-4 weeks from his initial estimate. The people for whom the software is being written fear taking action against the other programmer because the...

Characteristics of a Death March project

In software development, a death march project generally refers to a project that has a fixed release date with fixed functionality and fixed resources - resulting in crazy demands from management that developers work extra long hours and weekends. What do you think a death march project is and how does it come about? ...

getting rid of ruby gems that won't die

I've got a few ruby gems that won't go away. I think it has to do with when I installed them. Occasionally I have forgotten to use "sudo" before doing a gem install, which results in a write error and from what I can gather puts a copy of the gem in my user directory instead of somewhere it can run. But gem uninstall doesn't work. ...

How to compete on a scarce spec'd project to avoid team death-march

I'm time+cost estimating a semi-complex software solution, that hasn't got specific requirements in about 75% of features. I would still like to make as good estimate as possible, by getting additional data from the client. There will still be parts that may end up not being able to develop, since there's too many dependencies with other...

How to kill a project

Just looking for some collective wisdom -- what's the best way you've found to kill a project. For example: Change architectures half-way thru coding. Add new programmers to team when project is starting to fall behind schedule. In an effort to save money, force all developers to use old equipment and stop providing free caffeine. ...