If Software Was Like The Super Bowl

We'd have cheerleaders, fans, and of course . . .  reporters to write about it all.

V-TPS Team Defeats Milestone 6 in Overtime

Ken Hoethlisberger came out of the project war room with a huge smile and a fist pump. "We did it!", he shouted. "We shipped!"

When asked about the victory, Ken gave credit to his hard working team. "All the sprints, the analysis, the design - it all paid off in the end." The release was a sweet redemption for project manager Hoethlisberger, who missed the first four weeks of the year after being forced to take a leave of absence following a charge of sexual misconduct at the office holiday party.

Rookie phenom developer Mawiya Lakshanya played a crucial role in the final stretch.  Lakshanya, the team's #1 pick from the West Miami College of Culinary Arts and Computers, knocked out 156 defects on just 14 system change requests - a feat not seen since Billy "Broccoli" Nagurski's 151 fixed defects during the ill fated "Project Enterprise Reporting" campaign of 1998.

"It's easy", says a humble Lakshanya. "QA does all the hard work of finding the gaping security holes, and I just follow their lead." Her flamboyant counterpart, Mandy Ross, was a little more assertive. "They need to give me more SCRs - we could've been done a week ago and I'd spend tonight in the hot tub with a bottle of Merlot instead of eating cold pizza in a break room full of dorks." Unnamed sources inside the team say Ross is looking for another job.

The final nail biting moments once again came down to the foot of veteran IT manager Sebastian Lockitdownski. "Yeah - sometimes the CPU fan on that server doesn't spin up after a reboot and the BIOS just halts." Lockitdownski's kick in the dimly lit server closet looked errant at first. "I thought I shanked it", he says, "but seconds after I made contact on the side panel the disk lights started to flicker and I knew it was a good kick".

Senior Developer A.J. Butler left with an injury halfway through the iteration. Doctors say Butler suffered a repetitive stress injury in his mouse hand and should return to coding action in 2 to 4 weeks - in time to face the heavily favored Milestone 8.