Well, so far I’ve gotten a total of zero comments, responses, cries for help, taunts, dares, or dirty jokes in response to yesterday’s blog about embarking upon a new edition of my Death March book. Well, maybe there were some dirty jokes; fortunately, my spam filter seems to do a pretty good job of eliminating those, since it informs me that it has eliminated 9,855 spam messages since I installed it last month.

I assume that some people are so busy with their own death-march projects that they haven’t even had time to read yesterday’s blog posting; others have read it, but are too busy to respond. And perhaps still others would like to respond, but feel so terrified, discouraged, or furious to say anything coherent. I can only hope that there are a few people out there who still have their wits about them, still have some energy, and still have a burning desire to help their fellow software developers figure out better ways to survive and succeed with death-march projects. And that doesn’t count the billions of people who have no idea who I am, or what I’m talking about, and who stumbled onto this blog posting entirely by accident.

By the way, for those who haven’t read previous editions of the book (shame on you! will I be reduced to eating dog food and Spam during my retirement years?), here’s a list of the chapters of material; this may give you a better idea of what we’ll be discussing in the new edition:

1. Death march defined: categories of death march projects; why do death-march projects happen? why do people participate in death-march projects?
2. Politics: identifying the political players in the project. Determining the basic nature of the projectc. Levels of commitment by project participatns. Analyzing key issues that lead to political disagreements.
3. Negotiations: rational negotiations. Identifying acceptable tradeoffs. Negotiating games. Negotiating strategies. What to do when negotiation fails.
4. People in death-march projects: Hiring and staffing issues. Loyalty, commitment, motivation, and rewards. The importance of communication. Team-building issues. Workplace conditions for death-march projects.
5. Death march processes: The concept of triage. The importance of requirements management. SEI, ISO-9000 and formal versus informal processes. Good-enough software. Best practices and worst practices. Death-march meets XP.
6. The dynamics of processes: Models of software development processes. Visual models. An example: Tarek Abdel-Hamid’s software process model.
7. Critical-chain scheduling and the theory of constraints: What organizational behaviors are dysfunctional? How can we change dysfunctional organizational behavior? Life in a rational world. Critical-chain scheduling.
8. Time management: The impact of corporate culture on time management. Time slippage from stakeholder disagreements. Helping the project team make better use of time.
9. Managing and controlling progress: The “daily build” concept. Risk management. Additional ideas for monitoring progress: milestone reviews.
10. Death march tools and technology: The minimalist toolset. Tools and processes. Risks of choosing new tools.
11. Simulators and “war games”: The concept of war games.

One of the things I haven’t yet decided is whether I’ll provide the draft chapters of the new edition — for discussion, debate, and collaboration — with a wiki, or a blog (perhaps this very blog), or some other mechanism. If you have any strong feelings, or clever suggestions, let me know. In the past, I’ve simply uploaded draft chapters of a book as Microsoft Word files, and invited people to download, read, and comment on them. I might do that again, or perhaps upload PDF chapters. But I’d like to provide some kind of community-style forum, so people can not only interact with me, but also with each other. So, again, what’s your preference: blog? wiki? discussion forum? MySpace (shudder)? Second Life (the mind boggles)? Something else?