Heidi S and Michael Hanson's employer was building an enterprise shipping/warehousing system but didn't have enough in-house resources to do it. One of the contractors they brought in to help fill the gaps was Paula, an "experienced Java programmer with strong knowledge of the shipping industry." For the first few months, things seemed to be going pretty well. At the weekly status meetings, Paula would report that good progress had been made and things were looking good for the deadline.

But as the deadline loomed closer, Paula reported that she was running into a lot of difficulties and would need some additional resources to finish up her piece. When Heidi and Michael came in to help, they realized gross of an understatement "some" was. Following is all of the code Paula had written for the application ...

package test; public class paulaBean { private String paula = "Brillant" ; public String getPaula() { return paula; } }

* And just to let you know, I will be vacationing in Boston** next week and will not be posting anything to the site. Don't worry though, Jake Vinson will fill in and repost some of the "classic WTFs."

** Yes, Boston. That's one of the nice things about living in Cleveland: visiting just about any other city in the US a really cool experience.