The technology was supposed to be bulletproof by now. Other engineers throughout the lab were caught up in similarly black ruminations. It was time to question sacred assumptions. But then came the bells, whistles and chrome. At first there had been vigorous warnings and dire predictions from technical quarters.
Nothing is foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.
As WHIP was diddled, tweaked, dithered and extended, the hoops in the test suite began to fall. But as weeks passed, the ripples became increasingly obscure and remediation decreasingly effective. One set of patches would result in a whole new constellation of falling hoops in far-flung locations, and each time the explanations proved more elusive. And so the human behavior in the lab became more buggy, too. The programmers became paranoid and defensive about their craft.