Check out 101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed. Some of my favorites:
- You start hiring consultants so they can take the blame
- Project estimates magically match the budget
- Developers use the excuse of ’self documenting code’ for no comments
- You still believe compiling is a form of testing
- Your manager insists that you track all activity but never uses the information to make decisions
- Your white boards are mostly white
- The client continually mistakes your burn-down chart for a burn-up chart
- A Change Control Board is created and your product isn’t even its first alpha version
- All performance issues are resolved by getting larger machines
- You know exactly how many compile warnings cause an ‘Out of Memory’ exception in your IDE
- Broken unit tests are deleted because they are obviously out of date