Michael Hunter writes: "'Everyone knows' that testers can't do anything until they have something to test. [..] Therefore it goes without saying that testers are pretty much useless until Dev has written enough bugs (erm, code, I should have said) that there is something worth testing. This puts Test perpetually behind the curve with no chance of ever catching up. While Dev has moved on to the next milestone Test is still banging on the previous one. Any bugs they find are often ignored until Dev can bear to pull themselves off their fun new work back onto all that boring 'completed' code they wrote last milestone. The only reason the product ever ships is that eventually the Devs hit code complete and (theoretically, at least) stop writing features and focus completely on fixing bugs."