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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Workers

An American manufacturer is showing his machine factory to a potential customer from Albania. At noon, when the lunch whistle blows, two thousand men and women immediately stop work and leave the building.

“Your workers, they’re escaping!” cries the visitor. “You’ve got to stop them.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll be back,” says the American. And indeed, at exactly one o’clock the whistle blows again, and all the workers return from their break.

When the tour is over, the manufacturer turns to his guest and says, “Well, now, which of these machines would you like to order?”

“Forget the machines,” says the visitor. “How much do you want for that whistle?”

Software Development Cycles

1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
5. Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
6. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
7. Users find 137 new bugs.
8. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
9. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
10. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
11. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
12. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.
13. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free…