construx http://www.stevemcconnell.com/rdenum.htm

Mistakes at software developments
The 36 Original Classic Mistakes according to CONSTRUX
For the record, the table below lists the original classic mistakes from Rapid Development. And here is a link to the full text of the original Classic Mistakes chapter from Rapid Development).


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People-Related Mistakes
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1. Undermined motivation
2. Weak personnel
3. Uncontrolled problem employees
4. Heroics
5. Adding people to a late project
6. Noisy, crowded offices
7. Friction between developers and customers
8. Unrealistic expectations
9. Lack of effective project sponsorship
10. Lack of stakeholder buy-in
11. Lack of user input
12. Politics placed over substance
13. Wishful thinking

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Process-Related Mistakes
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14. Overly optimistic schedules
15. Insufficient risk management
16. Contractor failure
17. Insufficient planning
18. Abandonment of planning under pressure
19. Wasted time during the fuzzy front end
20. Shortchanged upstream activities
21. Inadequate design
22. Shortchanged quality assurance
23. Insufficient management controls
24. Premature or too frequent convergence
25. Omitting necessary tasks from estimates
26. Planning to catch up later
27. Code-like-hell programming

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Product-Related Mistakes
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28. Requirements gold-plating
29. Feature creep
30. Developer gold-plating
31. Push me, pull me negotiation
32. Research-oriented development

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Technology-Related Mistakes
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33. Silver-bullet syndrome
34. Overestimated savings from new tools or methods
35. Switching tools in the middle of a project
36. Lack of automated code testing
http://www.stevemcconnell.com/rdenum.htm

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Strategy-Related Mistakes
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37. Single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make is to decide to rewrite the code from scratch.
http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don't even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don't actually have "more experience". You're just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren't in the original version.