Oh yeah, I've had a few projects killed by technical debt.
A lot of these are game mod related. Since hey, even the base game is a black box loaded with the technical dev of a team that could have been gone for decades. And the very tools and patches you're using on top of it were then also by people wanting theings done the 'quick' and 'easy' way over the 'right' way. Usually because said people constructed the tool in question for their project, and had designed it specifically for the environment they were working in rather than anyone else's. So you'll often see such a project completely fall apart because you don't understand all the code you used or how it interacts with the other stuff you used without understanding it.
But a few were actual work projects for clients. These fell apart because the following sequence of events occurred:
1. A coder was hired to work on the system and had a very different coding style to everyone else in the company. They thought they were being 'smart' but had overengineered the project by about a hundredfold.
2. They got sacked without telling anyone else how the project was constructed or why it was built that way. So developer B took over.
3. Developer B tried to 'rewrite' the system completely, but ended up merely creating a hodgepodge of his work and the other developer's work that ended up being rather unstable.
4. More features were requested from the client (which the system wasn't designed for), so three more developers each added them on independently. None of this work was commented, documented anywhere or stored in version control, so they bolted the features extras on, tested just that one part of the system and claimed it worked fine.
5. Project ran into large numbers of bugs, often ones which crashed the system or took down the database for a while. Multiple times a day, whatever developer was free would have to apply patches to whatever random thing stopped working in the last few hours.
6. Everyone ended up complaining that the system didn't work. Or that it should be rewritten. Or that it wasn't what the client 'wanted' at all despite the latter having changed their plans three times this week.
Either way, what should have been simple websites turned into giant unwieldy messes that no one developer understood the full design of. Which sat in endless limbo while developers ran around trying to patch up problems caused by no one having a coherent plan for the whole project.
A lot of these are game mod related. Since hey, even the base game is a black box loaded with the technical dev of a team that could have been gone for decades. And the very tools and patches you're using on top of it were then also by people wanting theings done the 'quick' and 'easy' way over the 'right' way. Usually because said people constructed the tool in question for their project, and had designed it specifically for the environment they were working in rather than anyone else's. So you'll often see such a project completely fall apart because you don't understand all the code you used or how it interacts with the other stuff you used without understanding it.
But a few were actual work projects for clients. These fell apart because the following sequence of events occurred:
1. A coder was hired to work on the system and had a very different coding style to everyone else in the company. They thought they were being 'smart' but had overengineered the project by about a hundredfold.
2. They got sacked without telling anyone else how the project was constructed or why it was built that way. So developer B took over.
3. Developer B tried to 'rewrite' the system completely, but ended up merely creating a hodgepodge of his work and the other developer's work that ended up being rather unstable.
4. More features were requested from the client (which the system wasn't designed for), so three more developers each added them on independently. None of this work was commented, documented anywhere or stored in version control, so they bolted the features extras on, tested just that one part of the system and claimed it worked fine.
5. Project ran into large numbers of bugs, often ones which crashed the system or took down the database for a while. Multiple times a day, whatever developer was free would have to apply patches to whatever random thing stopped working in the last few hours.
6. Everyone ended up complaining that the system didn't work. Or that it should be rewritten. Or that it wasn't what the client 'wanted' at all despite the latter having changed their plans three times this week.
Either way, what should have been simple websites turned into giant unwieldy messes that no one developer understood the full design of. Which sat in endless limbo while developers ran around trying to patch up problems caused by no one having a coherent plan for the whole project.