The book How to Fail at Software Development describes the mistakes and mis-judgements that cause software development projects to consume time and money and produce nothing. The book includes a 16 question test that you can apply to your software development project to determine whether and how it is doomed. It contains explanations of how things are done to push projects beyond the ends of their schedules and cause them to produce software that is so filled with bugs that it becomes an adventure to try to use. You will find stories of some major disasters of the past and see the decisions that brought them to their glorious end. You can find out how even the most tried and true approaches to software development can be made into a pointless march to no place in particular. Some paths to failure are obvious while others are subtle and difficult to detect. You are able to quickly spot some project killers as they run loose in the wild, but others are so subtle that you may need some help to realize the road ends at a cliff. This books describes decisions and procedures that can inject fatality into a project. One chapter describes some of the reasons why a project manager may want to intentionally scuttle a project. No good can come of an unsupported disorganized project applying a partially comprehended solution to a misunderstood problem.