Over the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of readers, especially female, ask what happened to Manuel and whether he managed to meet his deadline. If you remember, we left him ordering pizza in preparation for a mid-week all-nighter.

One of a few, actually. I’ll let the diagram tell the story and use this opportunity to revisit

Loops

For an introduction to loops (and for a sassy story) see this post: UML 2.0 Sequence Diagrams – loops.

This time we have a while loop. That means that the actions inside the loop will be done over and over again while the loop condition is true. In this case the loop condition is [while deadline >= today], or in English: ‘while the deadline is still ahead of today’.

As it happens, this is our salesman Fibbs’s interpretation of Agile Development: if there are hours remaining to the deadline, keep adding features. Interestingly enough this seems to lead to success most of the time…

So it happened again. Manuel delivered the final version on the said Friday, went home, slept for 12 hours, then went and asked his manager Fossey for a promotion. Neither of us knows details of exactly what happened other than the promotion didn’t happen. And that Fossey reportedly spoke along the lines of ‘Ja, ja, life’s not fair’. Manuel got his overtime paid, though. And packed up to go on holiday…

And then she said…

As surprising as it may be, turns out while Manuel’s brain was busy with shovelling code for the new features, his eyes and heart were somewhere else…

This was reported to me by the office cleaner, who was supposedly the only witness…

Manuel doesn’t seem to have been too disheartened, though. This was his last Facebook update:

The cool cartoons are courtesy of zlotence.