How should I behave as a developer in a project that's headed for failure?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I am a developer in a 5-member team and I believe our project is headed for disaster. I'll describe why in a moment, but my question is: how should I behave?

The deadline is in 1.5 months, and I feel no matter what we do, this project will fail. I'm of the opinion that we should just terminate the project and stop wasting our time, but politically I think it's impossible for our manager to do that.

What should I do in this case? Should I put in extra effort, or should I just take it easy? And what should I say to the manager?

Reasons this project is headed for failure:

• With deadline approaching many of the must-have features are not finished
• Application is unstable and very difficult to use
• System is very convoluted, code very hard to understand, very difficult to change - Data model is too driven by a complex relational database (100+ tables)
• Unclear leadership; the manager responds to new information with major changes
• Almost no automated tests or unit test
• Heavily depends on other systems, but no integration tests yet

In fact, we actually just inherited this project (along with the mess) around 1-2 months ago from another dev team under the same manager, who has worked on it for a few months.

manpreet 2 years ago