Week 8 Dig: Cause of death

Forensic diagnosis — why projects die, a taxonomy of failure modes, and how to distinguish burnout from ecosystem shift from silent success.

12 April 2027

Before the dig#

Review your findings from weeks 2–7. Using the taxonomy from this week’s lecture, draft a cause-of-death diagnosis for your dig site:

• Maintainer burnout — the last human commits are bug fixes with increasingly terse messages
• Ecosystem shift — the project’s niche was swallowed by a platform change or a dominant competitor
• Hostile fork — a fork attracted the community and the original lost its contributors
• Funding loss — the project depended on a sponsor who withdrew
• Mass dependency failure — a key upstream dependency broke or was abandoned
• Mission accomplished — the project does what it set out to do, and silence is success
• Rewrite trap — a v2 branch was started, never finished, and the energy to maintain v1 was gone

In the session#

Present your diagnosis. The class cross-examines: what evidence supports your reading, and what alternative explanation fits the same evidence? A project that looks like burnout from the commit messages might look like ecosystem shift from the dependency graph.

Afterwards#

The Forensic Analysis is due next week. Your cause-of-death diagnosis is the centrepiece. Revise it based on today’s feedback.