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How Projects Die : Domino Collapse

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
5 min readJul 16, 2022

The ‘death by a thousand cuts’ of the software development lifecycle.

Photo by Bradyn Trollip on Unsplash

I’ve always been fascinated with the software development lifecycle — in particularly handling the tremendous cognitive dissonance between how it’s laid out in theory and how it’s played out in practice.

I’m not going to get in to agile too much here (yeah, right), heaven knows it’s an easy target, and I refer you to many of my previous articles that venture into what I believe is its ongoing tremendously detrimental effect on the grand game.

What I’m going to touch on in this missive spans across many different methodologies (though I will mention agile from time to time) from the solid, dependable waterfall all the way to the haphazard, never quite knowing what you’re doing, “look at all those bits of colour paper on the wall” agile².
See what I did there?

What all projects share is a series of milestones², objectives that have to be completed, whether they’re concurrent or sequential is inconsequential³, and as they’re all completed the project is stamped ‘finished’.

My premise today is that you can spot pretty early on when a project is destined to failure by the number and frequency of its missed internal deadlines.

The Theory of Domino Collapse

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Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

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