"No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy" is a famous phrase by German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke back from 1861.

This is just as true in software development - I can crudely paraphrase this into "No software design survives the contact with the realities of technology and actual users". I have seen this time and again over the last 15 years in my career,.

The preceding observation was recently made by Dmitriy Buterin, the developer of our membership software application, in Wild Apricot Software News - April 2012.

Make it 50 years for me if one occasionally substitutes "tool" or "product" for software.

Dmitiy knows what he is talking about from his experience as Chief Apricot for Wild Apricot.  We have seen similar issues. He goes on to mention illness (yes, more than once on our project) and when one programmer just doesn’t have the skills (yes, more than once on our project) and so forth.

We are now nearing the completion of the HBC and TDA websites and can hopefully say the enemy has been vanquished. All of this happened because of the support provided by: Dmitiy, and all the other Apricots (yes that’s what they call themselves); Michele Brougher, for the ride statistics application; the support staff at iPage, host for the TDA and HBC Backroom sites; and Jenna and Arlen, at Seed Development Network, for the calendar.