(Below is an excerpt from _Sunworld_Online_, July, 1997 -- web page . It is a review of a book that I am currently reading by Ed Yourdon, _Death_March_. Marching at Internet speed Small and quick are the only projects that make sense anymore, but, to make matters worse, management often requires they become even smaller and quicker. Increased business competition, more volatile corporate politics, and other factors engender many projects that have utterly unreasonable deadlines and are resourced with half the money and people you need to get them done. Yourdon calls these projects death march projects. Sound familiar? It should. In Yourdon's latest book, Death March, he concludes from his own findings that at least half of all software projects are "death march" projects; such projects are becoming the norm rather than the exception. I'm surprised that the percentage is that low. Death March describes the world of corporate software development that I'm glad I left a couple of years ago. It's a world of paradoxes: 1.The only projects worth doing are those that promise breakthrough business gains, such as dramatic process change or competitive advantage. Those kinds of benefits are hard to sell (as we saw in Don Tapscott's The Digital Economy, reviewed in Bill's Bookshelf, May 1997). So instead the project is often sold on the basis of mundane, incremental business benefits. Incremental benefits mean small budgets and short timelines -- yet expectations are still on the breakthroughs. The results are projects with paltry budgets and timelines that must deliver miraculous results anyway. 2.Large corporations treat software developers poorly. Despite much gum-flapping to the contrary, IT is generally not at the table when executives discuss business strategies. Corporate developers are considered back-office overhead expense, which often means that they are not provided with good working conditions, tools, training, etc. Therefore, more and more of the best developers go to work for large consulting firms, such as EDS, Cambridge Technology Partners or the "Big Six" (Price Waterhouse, Coopers & Lybrand, KPMG Peat Marwick, Deloitte & Touche, and Ernst & Young). These firms offer excellent learning opportunities, great tools, solid career paths, and access to communities of talented people. But they require that you work "death march" 80-plus hour weeks and renounce all personal life. 3.The companies that need technology breakthroughs most desperately are almost always those that place the most obstacles in the way to getting them implemented. There is no dead hand of bureaucracy at a Silicon Valley start-up company. There sure is at, say, General Motors. 4.Silicon Valley start-up companies also customarily move at a "death march" pace, because of the "Internet time" schedules under which they need to bring products to market. In other words, there's no escaping the "death march," except in certain hidebound large corporate situations in which the projects probably aren't worth doing anyway. So what do you do when you are faced with a six-month timeline on a project that looks like it should take a year? You know you will be faced with long hours and unbearable pressure. What tools, what processes will help you get it done? That's what Death March is about. Death March's messages are prosaically simple: use common sense; maintain a low profile so that you can avoid corporate bureaucracy; don't start learning new software tools on a "death march" project; stick with what you know and can use immediately; be adamant about trading off time for functionality and quality. The book is also full of practical tips for project managers who must run "death march" projects, on such subjects as maximizing productivity amid horrifyingly long hours, retaining and motivating good people, negotiating with management, navigating political waters, and so on. This book contains advice that is disappointingly mundane, considering the source. Here is the man who virtually invented software development methodologies, now telling us to avoid the corporate "Methodology Police" in order to get the project done on time. He also makes a big deal out of the concept of triage, whose application to software development anyone who has seen M*A*S*H would understand intuitively. His advice is unquestionably good, but it amounts to this: forget all that highfalutin, fancy process stuff. Just use your common sense, stick with the tools you like best, and get the work done without unnecessary overhead. Who needs Ed Yourdon to tell them this? Perhaps the value of the message is to shake old-style software development organizations, which were built on Yourdon's (and others') strictures, out of their torpor. For them, this book would be like Cotton Mather telling his flock that a glass of wine with dinner every night is medically beneficial and makes you less uptight. These books are nevertheless worth reading, for a couple of reasons. First, Ed Yourdon is a very good writer. His style is reminiscent of the messages he is preaching: it's engaging, conversational, and dynamic, but it contains amusing vestiges of his former rigid outlook -- mainly in the form of textbook-like section and subsection numbers that don't really fit. Second, he brings the perspective of one who has probably seen more different software development situations than anyone else on Earth. And, admittedly, he has always claimed that blind adherence to (or inappropriate adoption of) any software methodology, whether his or another, leads to disastrous results. He has always encouraged us to use common sense and put tools and processes in perspective. That perspective is always worthwhile, even if some of the baggage he carries seems old and worn. Title: Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving `Mission Impossible' Projects Author: Edward Yourdon Publisher: Prentice Hall Computer Books ISBN: 0137483104 List price: $24.95