Calling All Death Marchers

Author Ed Yourdon is working on a third edition to his well known book about agonizingly bad software projects, Death March. In a recent blog post Yourdon sent out a call to software professionals to share their death march stories:

If you’re just embarking upon a death-march project, and you want to share the agony and the ecstasy with all of us in the blogosphere, get in touch with me. If you’ve been trapped in a death-march project for six months, and you desperately want to tell everyone what went wrong, and/or why nobody else should suffer a similar fate, send me an email. If you’ve finished an amazingly complex, high-pressure death-march project with triumphant success, and you want to share your secrets with everyone else, let me know. If it was a tool, or a technology, or a methodology, or an amazing management approach that turned out to be the difference between success and failure, track me down and tell me.

This is your chance to have your tale of woe enshrined in an important book, and maybe your story can help someone else down the road.

Speaking of Ed Yourdon and important books, Mr. Yourdon has also recently taken a very interesting publishing leap that should be getting more attention: he has converted his book Modern Structured Analysis into a free and open wiki. (As far as I can tell, Mr. Yourdon has now released the text under the GNU license.) The new version is called Just Enough Structured Analysis. He blogs about the project, and how you can participate, here. I've been digging into the wiki, and not only is the wiki itself extremely well done, but much of the material is still very relevant and readable.

All the best,
Dan