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Computerworld - If you've ever been a developer for a software vendor, you probably know the feeling: You're dealing with constantly shifting priorities, lurching from one short-term deadline to another, with no discernable overall direction. You start to wonder if you're crazy or everyone else is.

I have good news: You're not crazy, although there was a time when I would have said you were. As a third-time software entrepreneur, I'm your worst nightmare -- the one responsible for all that chaos. For years I felt my programmers' frustration but couldn't understand it. Everything made perfect sense to me: We were doing what we had to so we could survive and grow. So what we if we had to make midcourse corrections? To me, that was just responsiveness.

	Linda Hayes is CTO at WorkSoft Inc., a Dallas-based developer of next-generation test automation solutions. She is the founder of three software companies and holds degrees in accounting, tax and law. A frequent industry speaker and award-winning author on software quality, she pioneered automated testing tools. You can contact her at linda@worksoft.com or by visiting www.worksoft.com.

But I finally realized that I was missing something. It came about because I was feeling guilty about ridiculing a guy named Sam. Sam worked for a software company that I was consulting for, and his job was firefighter. He would raid the development and support groups for resources to put out fires, usually to address a big potential prospect's demands or solve a big customer's problem. The fact that such a position was even needed was testament to how much chaos the company was in.

I was working with the customer support group, and Sam had asked us to provide him with a special field in the issue-tracking system called "priority" that he could use to rank requests in order of heat. We had implemented the feature so that whenever something new was designated Priority 1, for example, then what used to be 1 became 2 and so on, but Sam objected. He needed to be able to have multiple No. 1 priority issues.

We laughed at him. To us it epitomized the mind-set that had created the chaos: How can you have more than one No. 1 priority?

Well Sam, I'm sorry -- I was wrong. You can have more than one. In fact, I finally realized that you actually have at least three top priorities at all times: past, present and future. The past is your existing customer base -- the cumulative set of