Once in a while a software project begins to go wrong. You know the score. Each day another critical bug appears in module X or the completion date for feature Y slips by a day. The team keeps working hard and produces stuff. Every day you are sure you’ve broken the back of the problems but then another appears. It saps your spirit and makes the team doubt themselves.
There’s a secret that comes with experience that you probably know. In fact there’s a saying that pretty much sums up the secret:
“If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole then the best thing to do is to stop digging.”
Apply this idea to the project going wrong. Is it really just a series of small incidents that, through a run of mind blowingly poor luck, have all started to bedevil the project one after another? Perhaps a more likely explanation is that there is a fundamental problem that is now showing its head. Is your development process out of control or inappropriate for your team or the project? Perhaps you have a poorly designed module that is poisoning the well. Maybe there is a bad assumption in the business design of the application. Who knows. But maybe, just maybe, there is a single more fundamental reason why the project has gone of the rails. Your mission is to discover the fundamental problem. Good luck.