Here are a collection of quotes that can drive fear into the heart of every developer. They’re made worse when heard at the start of a new gig, as any hope of a brave new world is smashed before you even get a login!

1. We are using Agile, but have made a few adjustments.
2. We need to make some changes to an application in production, but we don’t have the source code any more.
3. How’s your Excel/VBA?
4. We’ll worry about testing later.
5. Make sure you abstract the database layer, just in case we want to switch from SQL 2005 to db4o.
6. We make heavy use of enterprise design patterns, especially inversion of control and dependency injection. We don’t want to be tightly coupled to anything.
7. We have a Biztalk license.
8. In the interim, can you please work on these reports?
9. We use the latest and greatest technology, such as SQL 2000 and .NET v1.1.
10. We have written our own framework and code generator.
11. Have you ever written any Cobol?
12. We have the work but it hasn’t been approved yet.
13. We use VSS 6.0 for Version Control. – Inspired by M Princz (below)
14. All testing is done by the BAs. – Inspired by M Princz (below)
15. We’re using Great Plains for timesheets.
16. We’ve got a stack of 3rd party UI controls that we don’t use any more, but we have to link them in otherwise the back-end code breaks. – Inspired by JoCo

There are lots more, but I’ve forgotten them. I’ll be sure to add them as I remember.

… any suggestions?