Last night I was looking for a demotivator for Death Marches, but couldn’t find one. (Quality came close but wasn’t was I was trying to capture.) For those unfamiliar with the term, wikipedia defines it as such:

In the software development and software engineering industries, a death march is a dysphemism for a project that is destined to fail. Usually it is a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often includes lack of appropriate documentation, or any sort of relevant training. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching the team as it marches into the sea. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours, weekends, or by attempting to “throw (enough) bodies at the problem” with varying results, often causing burnout.

This isn’t a bad description, but I don’t like the use of the word ‘fail’ too much. Chris McMahon put it well on twitter last night that sometimes meet their objectives which is not really a fail.

Death march survival is one of those rites of passage in the tech world along with your first brush with layoffs. One thing that I am starting to notice is that Death Marches are a lot less prevalent in organizations that actually get Agile development.

I like Elisabeth Hendrickson’s definition of Agile: Agile teams

  • Deliver a continuous stream of potentially shippable product increments
  • At a sustainable pace
  • While adapting to the changing needs and priorities of their organization

Notice the second bullet in particular; at a sustainable pace. Death Marches are the anti-sustainable pace as they sacrifice the future for the current.

And now for the promised zombie tie-in.

I’ve seen it often that those in the midst of a Death March start to exhibit zombie like pursuit of project completion (SHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPP!!!) which can have pretty negative consequences for product Quality. But I know lots of people who have done the Death March before who are really smart which got me looking around for a zombie hierarchy. Turns out there isn’t really one as compared to Vampires; I was looking for the Lich King of zombies since zombies are at their core selfish creatures which doggedly pursue a single goal and so have no leadership. (I did find a fun page of zombie types though.) I did find a zombie type which might come close to describing this phenomenon and that is the Quisling. There seems to be some debate in the Zombie fandom world about whether this is an official Zombie type but it serves my purpose to call it such. Again, here is wikipedia‘s definition of a Quisling zombie:

In Max Brooks’ novel World War Z, “quisling” refers to a human that had broken down psychologically due to the presence of zombies and thus begun acting like a zombie. These humans attack other humans mindlessly but are still attacked by normal zombies who can tell the difference. Being bitten by a “Q” (Quisling) does not result in zombification of the victim, but nonetheless imposes sincere mental stress on the victim since he/she believes to be ultimately infected – thus, the “Q’s” are being described as a danger which must not be underestimated.

I think we might also have a new team metric: Q ratio – the number of Quislings vs. Humans. Anything greater than 0 is a team fail.