a recipie you don't want

For reasons which will be obvious to my colleagues but which will remain unspoken here, I have been thinking a bit about what contributes to project failures. Lee Braithwaite wrote an excellent blog entry on the subject.

What I've Learned from Failure

"The next thing I've learned from my failures is something familiar to the test-driven development crowd. It's mandatory to fail early. You need to know you're in trouble right away. That's essential when taking over an existing project or starting something new. You have to find out how you're doing within weeks. Not quarters, not months. The longer you wait, the more inertia the failure will have."