Types of Development Delays

Here's some food for thought. Comments and further elaborations are encouraged.

Xeno's Paradox

in order to do A, B and C you need to do D and E, and in order to do C and D you need to do F... on and on, with further requirements added onto the end of the chain. The amount of progress toward the goal is constant, while at the same time the amount of work required to reach the goal remains constant.

Concrete Wall

The amount of work that can be done drops to zero, requiring the developer to back up and try another route. Often occurs when there is no documentation of a particular feature or bug, or technological limitations prevent further development (e.g. fork in php)

Concrete Circle

Like "Concrete Wall" but with vendor lock-in and no impetus or ability to migrate away from the platform. Usually results in a complete rewrite using a different technology and a different set of developers.

The Tarpit

One element in a development project that bogs everything and everyone down. Comes in several forms: new developers may inadvertently be a tarpit while they get up to speed.

The Bottleneck

An entity that must give a rubber-stamp to every aspect of the project. Produces similar results to the Tarpit: often it's hard to tell the difference.

The Soul Syphon

A person, or a environmental feature. Anything that breaks developer morale: loud environments (cubicles are also good for this), poor heating/cooling, poor ergonomics, and/or inadequate technologies are all shining examples of how to kill morale.

The Goose Chase

Development proceeds on a wild tangent for a brief period (usually a few weeks or months) only to find that the expedition has no value. Alternatively: may take the form of an out-of-the-loop manager who makes a request and returns only to change priorities weeks in the future.

The Snowball

The project starts small, but picks up momentum as more features are wanted, and people realize that more work is required than was initially thought. Can have a variety of causes: including poor research and planning, sudden changes to underlying libraries and technology, to budget cuts.