At this point, Port was riding high on the surging wave of interest in enterprise information portals. In fact, the company had just executed a successful IPO and moved into a spanking new set of corporate offices. The new CTO had convinced the rest of the management team that we were perfectly positioned to dominate the market within two years. We were going to crush the competition with innovative new products and brilliant business strategies.

Because the company was now public, we had to address Wall Street's concerns about hitting our revenue numbers, and Alan drafted me to help prepare a presentation for some deep-pocketed financiers. To my surprise, halfway through the presentation, he boldly announced that we would be releasing the next major version of our software in June of that year -- less than six months away.

This was not only the first time I'd heard anything about new software, it was apparently some pretty powerful code since, as our new CTO explained, the new version was based on advanced architecture that would enable customers to plug virtually any information source they wanted into the portal. News to me.

I joined a meeting in Alan's office the next morning, looking forward to hearing how we were gonna pull off this engineering coup in less than half a year. Alan explained that we'd save months of development time because the new software would be released without a beta test. Yikes! When I expressed my concern, he assured me that the engineering team he'd brought with him from his old telecom had a robust alpha testing process in place, and the application would not be released until it was fully checked out.

OK, I said, but why not run a beta test too, just to be sure? Alan looked at me like I was a dim bulb. If we took the time to run a beta program, he pointed out, we'd miss the June release date he'd promised Wall St. Duh.