I've been involved with professional teams for about a decade, and in that time I've seen some bizarre reasons for project failures. This talk will walk you through real-life project failures I've been in. All seem obvious in retrospective, but at the time weren't so clear.

Our framing context will be the "Five Why"s system of continuously asking questions to understanding failures. We'll use it to set up systems to prevent major mistakes.

The five situations we'll dig into will be:
1. Buggy releases: why obvious, even debilitating, bugs creep into so much software, and how release checklists can help
2. Bus people: avoiding centering too much knowledge on single team members, with tips for effective team knowledge building strategies
3. Jerk seniority: prioritizing cultures of collaboration and learning best practices, especially using Radical Candor
4. No seniority: getting team members the experience they need, and underloading schedules to ensure they have time to mentor and step up as rockstars and superstars
5. Great successes: learning from, sharing out, and appropriately rewarding team members for successful releases

Let's dig into why software projects fail!