Apart from agreeing with other replies about supporting the team and staying our of their way, the manager should also be pondering how they got to this mess in the first place. Having to work late is a screw-up, somewhere. Sometimes its because of things outside of the team's control but most of the time it isn't. If it happens regularly then there is definitely a systemic problem with the process that needs to be sorted out.

Perhaps if everyone in the slashdot community donated the price of a beer to the cause it will give Bletchley the resources needed for it survive, and show the British Government that people care about it.

does any dbms implement the relational model properly?

The trouble comes when you get used to live performances with real instruments - then pretty much all of this technology sounds off.

There was never a time honoured waterfall model, I quote Winston Royce that wrote the following under the diagram of the standard waterfall process:

the implementation described above is risky and invites failure ⦠The testing phase which occurs at the end of the development cycle is the first event for which timing, storage, input/output transfers, etc., are experienced as distinguished from analyzed ⦠The required design changes are likely to be so disruptive that the software requirements upon which the design is based and which provides the rationale for everything are violated. Either the requirements must be modified, or a substantial change in the design is required. In effect the development process has returned to the origin and one can expect up to a l00-percent overrun in schedule and/or costs.

read craig lahman's overview of incremental and iterative methods to learn the real history.

Do not allow politics (childish posturing by senior management) to force technical decisions on the team. Seasoned programmers don't suffer such nonsense and will leave - I've seen it on several teams.

weights boosts testosterone considerably as well as having a lot of other benefits.