A hacker is warning the team leader for a long time that the half-a-million-KLOC project is becoming a "big ball of mud" - there is no design, no documentation, barely any tests. The hacker says it will eventually trip the team and lose time, since debugging is very hard and there are a lot of defects. The team leades says there's no time for design, no time for refactoring and no time for testing - the application should work *yesterday*.

The hacker whips up some test scripts in Perl and works for a week to refactor some code that will save months of debugging later, but is being accused of wasting his time.