When I went to America I had to do some mysterious work on a piece of software. Mysterious because all I knew about the software was what it was going to be a FLIBBLE which was specified by the WIBBLE organisation. At first I didn’t even know whether the FLIBBLE was a piece of software or hardware. I was given many hundreds of pages of specifications. My boss was learning UML and trying to figure out the various UML tools. I boned up on UML and thought a lot of the diagrams were talking rubbish, but thought it must just be that it had been a while since University and I hadn’t touched UML since, and maybe UML had changed in that time.

The contract, the team, and presumably the project all kinda fell apart during and after my visit.

Here I am, two years later, and I’m now employed building a FLIBBLE again. This time we have a working FLIBBLE v0.1 to go from, and tests, and examples. This time I understand that the WIBBLE organization is in fact fallible. And the FLIBBLE specification is pretty bad! So I now feel a whole lot better about not being able to do it before - the fatal flaw had been assuming these people knew what they were on about!