I just learned today that our largest project has been canceled after 3 years. I’m still in a bit of shock that a decision was finally made. The project had every sign of going wrong over the last 3 years.
- It was a huge rewrite of a legacy application into a web application.
- It was going to be done in 6 months.
- It was supposed to add totally new functionality.
- Perhaps one or two of the developers had ever built a really large application.
- After 6 months no one could agree on the requirements, but the developers started coding anyway.
- The scope of the project completely shifted 3 times.
- All of the business logic and backend code was being done by a single developer.
- It added an enterprise rules engine that was going to allow business analysts to write the rules without any help from the developers.
- The new rules engine was going to save the project.
- One of the business rules documents contained a matrix with over 2000 business rules.
- A customer was never defined.
- The system had to have zero defects to be released.
- There were over 10,000 manual test cases run by the QA staff.
- There were over 1500 defects.
- There were two levels of validation known as Level 1 or Level 2 edits with different functions.
- Every lead on the project recommended killing it as the project progressed.
- It had 700 tests, but 500+ of them were functional integration tests not unit tests.
I think you get the picture. Anyway I feel remarkably free having a clean slate in front of me.