Over on kuro5hin there's an interesting article on a new AntiPattern. The Death Sprint is the result of a missapplied and badly implemented XP development process. As opposed to the more well known Death March, where nothing is ever released, though development goes on endlessly, the Death Sprint has frequent releases of code. However, over time the quality of the releases, and the quality of the underlying code base, gets worse and worse. The team is going faster than they can support, tripping over their own feet. With no time to refactor existing code before adding new features, or to consider their design, quality goes downhill, and each new feature becomes harder and harder to implement and introduces more and more bugs.

The cure is threefold. First pause to implement unit tests for existing features and make sure they all pass. Secondly refactor the existing code to make it cleaner and easier to modify in the future, checking with the unit tests at each stage so that bugs aren't introduced. Thirdly, and finally, keep the unit test disipline and add some design so that quality remains high in the future.