I believe the term you are looking for is Death March, though I suppose it doesn t really apply if the project is ultimately successful.

I would say "Underscoped".

I am involved with an underscoped project at the moment.

"Scope creep" is the phrase I ve used.

I once interviewed for a position on what had to be the ultimate Death March project. I was at Lockheed Martin at the time. Here s what I discovered at the interview:

• The project was almost entirely staffed by engineers pulled off of the layoff list. Pretty much the dregs of the company.
• They were using castoff equipment from the rest of the company for their software development.
• 15 hours a week of overtime was mandatory, and would be for the foreseeable future.
• They didn t even have cubicles. Everyone worked in one great big open bullpen with wires strung everywhere.
• They had attempted to deliver this project once before, but the customer rejected it and made them try again.
• They were so far over budget and so late that nobody was even bothering to track it anymore.
• They wanted to cancel the project, but their customer was the government of Egypt and they were threatening to stop a large order of F-15s until this project was delivered. (The project had nothing whatsoever to do with F-15s). So now they were getting pressure to finish from the Chairman of Lockheed Martin on down.
• Engineers visiting the customer site in Egypt had come down with nasty staph infections. One had to be medevacted out to Europe.

I swear I practically ran from the room.

Since hours are often associated with cost, perhaps the term you seek is Cost Overrun?

I also like the concept of Optimism Bias as the reason for under estimating.

I remember logic bombs applied to compressed files. Mainly, create a (back then, several gigs) file containing only one symbol repeated over and over. Zip the file (will become tiny). Send to user -> balloon effect.

Perhaps balloon project? Murphy s Project?

Spike may be useful in trying to get these under control but it isn t quite what you want.