Irregular Reporting of Societal Issues^SM

G8 Festival '07: Special Report

High: G8 Mosh Pit '07 This year's mosh pit was extremely high energy, with a lot more excitement than we have seen in several years. Vladimir Putin, known to his friends as "Ras", short for "Rasputin", dove into the crowd at one point, nearly causing chaos. "He was using a very aggressive moshing style that kinda made me uncomfortable", said Angela Merkel, a relatively inexperience mosher at the festival. Many participants credit the high energy of the mosh pit to the driving music at this year's festival, provided mostly by The Damned and Reagan Youth, in addition to the publicized conflict between Ras and festival regular "W".

Low: G8 Porta John '07 The lines for the portable latrines was far longer than in '06. While on the one hand, this represents the increasing popularity of the G8 Festival with new patrons, it also represents poor planning by the organizers. The less wealthy participants from places like Africa tended to gather around the latrines, harassing the more well-heeled patrons, leading to patently false smiles and pleasantries exchanged without real meaning. This sort of development highlights the difficulty that organizers will have keeping the festival relevant in the coming years.

Notable G8 Festival regular and frat boy "W" had to be accosted by event staff on several occasions for the anti-social behavior for which he has become known. This year was a bit different, however, given the public conflict between him and his usual partner, Ras, leading to a concern that the mosh pit would get out of hand. The expected conflict did not materialize, but W had to visit the first aid tent, after meeting Ras during an inverted keg hit. First aid workers report that W felt ill as a result of either the massive quantities of alcohol or the compromise with Ras. "Compromise is not healthy for W in large doses", said one medic.

Government Establishes Tighter Software Requirements Control

The difficulties and ambiguities of the requirements definition process have plagued all software development, including private industry, but one government team thinks they have a solution. The Department of Treasury has begun utilizing a collaborative requirements development process, whereby members of IT and the business gather together and agree on the requirements. Key to the success of this approach is the ability to directly tailor the requirements to the existing capabilities of the system. "We find that requirements have a significantly higher likelihood of success if we know that the system already performs that function", says Program Manager Don Dewitt. The entire management staff at Treasury is extremely pleased with the outcome. "Projects are significantly more on track, since we have been able to customize the requirements to actual capabilities of the system", says PM Dewitt, adding, "There is still more we can do".

Experts agree that this is just the first step toward a streamlined project process. Other agencies are looking into radical new processes like 'pragmatic testing', whereby test cases are defined based on the software you have, rather than the software you would like to put into production. "Success has been very narrowly defined for too long", says Michael Yutz, head of software quality assurance for a major project with the Department of Defense, where pragmatic testing has allowed projects to achieve 100% quality in the first iteration of testing.

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