Halloween stories of bad Project Management during Software Development. Based on actual experiences.

The Halloween Horror Stories

It’s your first day at work. The project manager almost has to crawl to enter the small space the client assigned you as an office. You are on the top floor of the building. Blinding lights besiege its white walls — no window allows itself to be seen. You’d think dark corners would be as bad as it gets.

He tells you that the requirements for this project have been established — you should read them and start coding. The project manager then shows you a sample interface to give you an idea of what you need to deliver. He introduces you to the “backend guy” that might take care of the database design.

You take a hard look at the tasks at hand. This project has two months allocated to it. “That doesn’t seem too bad” — you might say. Then the PM leaves, and you are left by yourself.

Of course, you are working for the company’s client. You basically need to enhance their app, replacing some of its features. In noticing this, you go to the 5th floor, where their IT department is, and you meet with them. You ask them to setup their legacy application for you. Maybe you ask for a code repo or some documentation. Doesn’t anyone understand? You need their application running so that you can work on top of it.

They tell you that they will “ship” a whole desktop with the configured application running, so that you may launch and modify it on a stage environment. You don’t know better and you agree to this.

A week goes by. The PM arrives at noon, as usual, and tells us that we need to keep requesting the guys on the 5th floor to get a working environment, since we want to deliver our project on time. After all, it has already been paid for. He then leaves again, as he had arrived, and doesn’t come back till another week.

The client takes a month to complete the request. Now, as fate would have it, you only have one month to complete your work. At the end of the month…guess what? You still don’t have a working environment from them. So you’ve been working on a standalone UI and some additional db schema without really knowing how it will integrate to anything. Its a standalone backend-less application. You need to figure out what to do to clean this mess up, and how to explain to your employer how these last two months went by.