Now it can be told

Not to be a stick in the mud, but when this blog launched a week in advance of our redesign rollout, I was wary of the idea. Why? Because when it comes to large, complex technology projects, the words "coming soon" may be the two most dangerous words in the English language.
 
Now that "coming soon" has turned into "now launched," I can breathe a cautious sigh of relief and let you in on a dirty little secret of large software development projects: They can sometimes go sideways in the late stages in the most unforeseen, horrible and completely absurd ways. Such as:

• That one “last little fix” you rushed to get in late turns out to break something considerably more important, like headlines rendering.
• You discover a performance issue that only manifests itself during an “extreme traffic” news event that, predictably enough, erupts moments after rollout (and yes, we are keeping a wary eye on Pakistan).
• An intense discussion over whether denying a late design change request amounts to a "nit no one will notice anyway" or "the usability apocalypse" turns into a conference-room-clearing chair fight.
• That one “last little task” you thought was going to take about half a day to complete turns out to take a million billion years.
• Something breaks on the live site and every group involved looks at each other and says, “I thought you were testing that.”
• An asteroid hits the server farm.