The Triumphant Return of Clinick's Clinic

Hey, this is my 100th post on Fabulous Adventures in Coding since I started in September. Good thing I type fast.

I'm sure that most of you are familiar with the classic "software ship cycle" used by Microsoft and myriad other software companies large and small. On the script team it went something like this:

1) Some customers make feature requests (where by "customer" I'm including internal customers like the IE, ASP and Visual Studio teams, as well as customers out in the real world.)
2) The devs bang out an implementation of the features they think will best serve those customers.
3) The testers test the heck out of the new features, the doc guys write the docs, the localizers translate the error messages into Japanese, etc.
4)What are the program managers doing this whole time? Well, Peter Torr answers huge numbers of questions in newsgroups, etc. Meanwhile, Andrew Clinick surfs the web for a few months. Once the code is written, tested, and shipped to customers, he writes up a "spec" describing what it does. Then he orders the "Script Happens!" T-Shirts for the team.
5) Six months have passed, so return to step 1. Remember, this was when people didn't guffaw at the expression "internet time".

And that's how we shipped ten versions of scripting in only 78 months (not counting the QFE releases). At least, that's the way I remember it! Other people might remember it slightly differently. If you want Andrew's take on it, maybe you should read his new blog. Welcome to the club, Andrew!