10. After your application starts failing everywhere, you talk to the DBA and he says, “I had to change the names on all the columns because I didn’t follow the company standard.
You can still make Friday’s deadline right?”
9. New requirements are added by the business manager so that the application works on his machine.
8. The current application is evolving faster than you can develop the replacement application.
7. Four hours in a requirements meeting were spent debating “extends” versus “includes” for part of a use case.
6. Requirements consist of an Access or Excel application with tons of VBA code. Oh, and you need to fix the bugs while you are at it (we don’t know what they are, but fix them before delivery).
5. “Give us honest estimates for how long the work is going to take. But make sure you finish in 2 months.”
4. Project Management = Microsoft Project
3. When hiring two contract programmers, management asks “We don’t need two computers do we? They can just share one right?”
2. The “Senior Technical Architect” on your web application project, assigned because he has 23 years with the company, has never done web development ever.
And the number one sign your project is doomed…
1. All requirements are critical, ultra-high, or high importance.