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My two cents: Ask for proper priorization and focus on completing as many features as possible, one after the other. It's far easier to build one feature while maintaining multiple others than to build multiple features at the same time, especially with a lot of legacy code. If they can't prioritize at this point, insist. Point out that in this situation where everyone is stressed for all the possible reasons, with proper priorization you're far, far more efficient than without. For all you know, you can be done with individual parts within hours if you can safely scratch other, less important features that are also in development, only to take them back up and running the next day as they become in turn the highest priority. If they still can't prioritize at this point, prioritize yourself. If you don't know it already, find a customer relationship contact and ask for one of the main timesinks for the users that the product is supposed to solve. Let him describe to you the usecase, or let him point it out to you in the functional specs, and do it from start to finish. This one has to work, and that's your new goal in life. Be proud when it's completed, your grunt work is done. Show it to your boss, and let him know that's what requires integration testing right now. Your new goal in life now, is to make sure that this usecase is viable in production. You will find new issues, encounter new problems, but these are better problems because they are not entirely up to your team, they are the kind of problems that a lot more people can understand since they are not purely dev issues. You will get a ton more help at this point, a ton more understanding, a ton more visibility on the project, and management will be able to make a much more informed decision about the so-called deadline. The key to proper "failing" of a project is to never let it be a complete failure. Finish a usecase and deliver it, so that at least someone could get added value from what the project committed. This is how the customer & management should prioritize for you: make sure that there are usecases where the product is fully functional from start to finish. |