Marketarian: “Hot! Hot! Hot! This project is so amazingly important it absolutely has to be squeezed into the next release!”

Geek: “So this project is so amazingly important it has to squeeze out the amazingly important project you came to me with yesterday that absolutely had to be squeezed into the release?”

Marketerian: “Of course I understand and embrace Agile Process – why do you ask?”

Geek: “No reason. I’ve just never seen requirements delivered on a hand-truck before.”

Marketerian: “Hey, Trevor, I know Code Complete is tomorrow, but check out this idea, wouldn’t it be cool if we streamed a video of users’ faces using the app, maybe in a rich-media banner? Not real users, we’d use actors of course, but…hey no, no wait!! OMG, we could show real users if we added an upload feature, or maybe a combination of the two…”

Geek: “Squirrel!”

Marketer: “You need me to review it and approve it today? Does it have to be today? I’ve got an outing – er, meeting thing this afternoon.”

Geek: “You need me to build it and deliver it this month? If the answer is no, have fun at Six Flags!”

Marketerian: “I don’t want to be pinned down. I’ll know the right look and feel when I see it.”

Geek: “Yeah, you know, I’m not going to bet the rent on that.”

Geek: “That bug? We’re looking into it.”
Marketerian: “That bug fix has been prioritized just behind retrieving the Nerf dart out of the atrium soffit.”

Geek: “Put it on the backlog – perhaps it will be prioritized into the next sprint.”
Marketerian: “Perhaps it will be prioritized in 2013 assuming the Mayan Calendar doesn’t end the sprint early.”

Geek: “Trevor couldn’t reproduce that bug – the software ran fine on his machine.”
Marketerian: “If we can get all our customers to fly to our city, take a cab to our office, ride the elevator to the sixth floor and use Trevor’s laptop, we won’t get any more complaints about the software crashing.”

Geek: “Trevor did point out that the interface design does assume a minimum level of user skill.”
Marketerian: “Trevor thinks our customers are knuckle-dragging Luddite mouth-breathers who couldn’t be taught to use an interactive tool with a seven-hour webinar, Siri, and a mime.”