What is "death march"

n. A forced movement of people, on foot, in such circumstances that many die during the journey.

A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees with the intent to kill, brutalize, weaken and/or demoralize as many of the captives as possible along the way. It is distinguished in this way from simple prisoner transport via foot march. Death marches usually feature harsh physical labor and abuse, neglect of prisoner injury and illness, deliberate starvation and dehydration, humiliation and torture, and execution of those unable to keep up the marching pace. The march may end at a prisoner-of-war camp or internment camp, or it may continue until all the prisoners are dead (a form of "execution by labor", as seen in the Armenian genocide among other examples).

The signing of the Fourth Geneva Convention declared death marches a form of war crime.

In project management, a death march is a project that the participants feel is destined to fail, or that requires a stretch of unsustainable overwork. The general feel of the project reflects that of an actual death march because project members are forced to continue the project by their superiors against their better judgment.

Software development and software engineering are the fields in which project management practices first applied the term to these related phenomena. Other fields have since recognized the same occurrence in their own spheres and have adopted the name.

Death marches of the destined-to-fail type usually are a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often include lack of appropriate documentation or relevant training and outside expertise that would be needed to accomplish the task successfully. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching themselves and their coworkers being forced to torture themselves and march toward death. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours (14-hour days, 7-day weeks, etc.) or by attempting to "throw (enough) bodies at the problem", often causing burnout.

Often, the discomfort is heightened by the knowledge that "it didn't have to be this way"; that is, that if the company wanted to achieve the goal of the project, it could have done so in a successful way had it been managed competently (such as by devoting the obviously required resources, including bringing all relevant expertise, technology, or applied science to the task rather than just whatever incomplete knowledge a few employees happened to possess). Patent under-resourcing is especially offensive at a large corporation with sufficiently deep pockets; at least at small companies, a gap between resources and needs is understandable, but at large, profitable, cash-rich companies, under-resourcing is not a necessity and thus feels to most workers like stupidity. Business culture pressures, such as the long-noted phenomenon of corporations pursuing short-term maximization of profits via cost cutting or avoidance that is damaging to long-term best interest, may play a role in addition to mere incompetence.

The term "death march" in this context was discussed at length in Edward Yourdon's book Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects (ISBN 0130146595), which has a second edition simply titled Death March (ISBN 013143635X). Yourdon's definition: "Quite simply, a death march project is one whose 'project parameters' exceed the norm by at least 50 percent."

A death march is a forced march of prisoners.

• Death marches (Holocaust), death marches of concentration camp prisoners in 1944 and 1945

Death march may also refer to:

• Death march (project management), a project that involves grueling overwork and (often) patently unrealistic expectations, and thus (in many cases) is destined to fail

Death March is a 2013 Philippine drama film directed by Adolfo Alix, Jr.. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.