Some Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed
1. Management has renamed its Waterfall process to Agile Waterfall
2. The company starts hiring consultants so they can take the blame
3. You product quality control is a checklist go through which you mostly ask yourself "Why this f..ing module doesn't work"
4. You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building
5. The lead web developer thinks the X in XHTML means ‘extreme’
6. Ever iteration meeting starts with “Do you want the good news or the bad news…”
7. Progress is now measured by the number of fixed bugs and not developed features
8. Your best and only friend is the janitor
9. Your best developer's education is just an A+ Certification
10. You do not understand the acronyms DRY, YAGNI, or KISS; but you do understand WCF, WPF and SCRUM
11. Every bug is prioritized as Critical
12. Every feature is prioritized as Trivial
13. Project estimates magically match the budget
14. Developers expresion ’self documenting code’ is used instead of 'commented code'
15. Sometimes you believe compiling is a form of testing
16. Your manager can be easily replaced with an email forwarding rule
17. Your team believes the transition from VB6 to VB.NET will be ’seamless’
18. The phrase ‘It works on my machine’ is heard constantly
19. The last conference your .NET team attended was Apple WWDC 2000
20. Your manager does not know how to check email
21. Your manager spends his lunch hour crying in his car
22. Your lead web developer defines AJAX as a cleaning product
23. The sales team decreased your estimates because they believe you can work faster
24. Everyday you work until Midnight, everyday your boss leaves at 4:30
25. The team members believe the merge algorithms in source control are black voodoo magic
26. The client continually mistakes your burn-down chart for a burn-up chart
27. Now it physically pains you to say the word – "Yes we can do that" or give an estimate
28. Your teammates don’t refactor, they refuctor
29. To reward you for all of your overtime your boss purchases a new coffee maker
30. Your project budget is entered in the company ledger as ‘Corporate Overhead’
31. You secretly outsource pieces of the project so you can blog at work
32. A Change Control Board is created when your product isn’t even in its first alpha version
33. Daily you consider breaking your fingers for the short term disability check
34. The deadline has been renamed a ‘milestone’… just like the previous one
35. You bring beer to the office during your 2nd shift
36. The project manager is spotted consulting a Ouija board to decide what to do next
37. The client will only talk about the requirements after they receive a fixed estimation
38. The boss does not find the humor in Dilbert
39. All performance issues are resolved by getting more modern machines
40. The project has been demoted to being released as a permanent ‘Beta’ version
41. Your car is towed from the office parking lot as it was thought to be abandoned
42. Your timesheet looks like a Viking-Lotto ticket
43. Throughing a coin is the best way to decide
44. You know exactly how many compile errors your IDE can show as a maximum
45. You have cut and pasted code
46. Broken unit tests are deleted because they are obviously out of date
47. You have a status "90% complete" 90% of the time your report your progress