Death Marches and Lost Patrols

 Recently, while moving around some boxes of books, I came across my copy of Ed Yourdon’s Death March. This morning I read it through again, to see if there were any lessons and comparisons I could make with it since the last time that I read it four years ago.

I’ve been on three projects over the years that could have been legitimately called, ‘Death Marches.’ My supervisor called one as such, another turned into one because of false expectations and schedule pressure, and the last one had Death March features although I asked for and received assurances that it was not going to be a Death March. The human cost and constant failure of these projects forever soured me on these kinds of projects.

With the recent adoption of Agile methodologies and even more use of the Agile buzzword for a spiral project lifecycle, more projects seem to be turning into ‘Lost Patrols’ rather than Death Marches. The metaphor of the ‘Lost Patrol’ comes from the Death March book as well. Death Marches usually have a goal and and a defined endpoint, in the delivery of a definite set of required functionality and features. Lost Patrols start out with a definite goal but end up getting lost in the forest.

This loss of the definite endpoint is a known problem with the spiral project lifecycle methodology. It can hit Agile when the project requirements and endpoints are left so undefined that the project team becomes lost. Activity may continue, but productivity does not. One of the perverse things that can happen with an Agile project is that the business owners and stakeholders get addicted to generating requirements. It becomes more interesting to them to keep on putting together list of requirements than to see a finished product.

As usual, the solution probably is to stop the project, get some bearings, and restart when project requirements and endpoints are more stable. This may require getting the business stakeholders to agree on what should be delivered when and when the product will go out of new development into maintenance and enhancement mode.