As much as I wish I wouldn't quote JoelOnSoftware.com so much, found another couple of humourous quotes. I created a very simplistic bug-report site for our latest (and first!) stand-alone VB app. Recently someone on Review Tools asplist.com list asked about bug tracking software for distributed employees, so to speak. FogBUGZ was recommended, which brings the total times I've seen Joel's company's software recommended all the way up to one.

Anyhow, so links in there lead me back to his joelonsoftware pages. Here's the quote that I can imagine is all-too-true:

What [Microsoft, who was reviewing the process for creating Word 1.0,] realized was that the project managers had been so insistent on keeping to the "schedule" that programmers simply rushed through the coding process, writing extremely bad code, because the bug fixing phase was not a part of the formal schedule... The story goes that one programmer, who had to write the code to calculate the height of a line of text, simply wrote "return 12;" and waited for the bug report to come in about how his function is not always correct.

I joked that I was tempted on a recent project to make the mapping portion of the site always turn up with hurricane Hugo displayed, which turned out to be what people (we're based in Charleston) were looking for 9 times outta ten (no kidding) in our internal reviews. Just to say I bet this sorta thing happens a lot more often that I'd think. If that can happen.