Sad -but-true story. I've worked with teams who consistently delivered reliable, useful, usable software time after time, and the customer just didn't notice.
The customer did notice teams who heroically put out fires with every release - fires that those teams had started.
So we learned to start fires. Add a couple of show-stopping bugs, or a Thread.sleep() in some performance-critical code, that could be removed in a heartbeat.
Software development's mostly about managing expectations.
