Comment by dcminter

There's definitely a zone of despair on most projects I've been on - particularly greenfield projects - the whole thing seems misguided, the codebase is no longer pristine, often I come up with some horrifying realisation of an overlooked technical issue. It feels like we're moments away from failure.

So far it's never proven to be true and, yes, it generally turns out that we're incredibly close to delivery.

I think it's because we get our noses rubbed in all the small problems of the codebase at this point - before that it's not working well enough to see all of the issues, we're more focused on delivering some big chunk of functionality at all to perceive the smaller flaws. Because the small flaws outnumber the "bug chunks" stuff it feels like we're going backwards, but we're not.

It's a bit like essay writing. You get fed up with the whole thing when it's nearly finished because you've looked at it SO many times that it feels boring and all the little typos and grammatical mistakes take forever to fix up and every time you do you find more. It's hard to keep in mind that the problems are getting smaller with each iteration even though they're increasing in number.

Does that sound like the thing you're talking about?