Software Development Methodologies Make Late Dash for Olympic Inclusion

Phew, it’s an energetic business this software development!  With the growing lexicon of sporting phrases entering the lingua franca, software developers have never needed to be fitter.  We’ve got ’daily scrums‘, ‘sprints‘ and an ever-increasing need to be ‘agile‘.  So with just under two years to go until the opening ceremony, surely it’s not too late to include software development methodologies as a new Olympic Sport at London 2010?    

When is a Question not a Question

The summer holiday period is in full swing, the level of traffic on roads on the way into work is much reduced.  The daily commute is almost tolerable, and hurrah for that. 

However, the rush-hour roads have been displaced by an altogether different kind of menace, in the form of grammatically flawed dot-matrix signs containing all kinds of inane, poorly-punctuated messages.  

Gone are the usual depressing selection of messages warning of traffic congestion, serious accidents and road closures.  Only, we seem to have entered the newspaper equivalent of the silly season, only with worse grammar. 

I give you a small selection of a few variable message signs that I’ve encountered on my daily commute along the A720 Edinburgh City Bypass: 

Have you got enough question marks?: 

“HAVE YOU GOT ENOUGH FUEL” 

“HAVE YOU FASTENED YOUR SEATBELT” 

“COULD YOU RELY ON YOUR SPARE TYRE” 

“COULD YOU CAR SHARE”

“CHECK YOUR VEHICLE IS YOUR LOAD SAFE”

“COULD YOU REDUCE YOUR CARBON EMISSIONS”

Without so much as an apostrophe or a full stop: 

“MOBILE PHONES – DONT RISK IT” 

“DONT ADJUST SAT-NAV WHEN DRIVING”

“DONT DRINK AND DRIVE” 

“DONT USE MOBILE PHONE WHEN DRIVING” 

“WEAR SEATBELTS – ITS THE LAW” 

“USE CORRECT CHILD SEAT DONT RISK IT”

So, the answer to the question in the headline is – when it doesn’t have a question mark at the end.  Oh, and I hope you spotted my deliberate mistake in not adding one to the headline. 

Please can we have some punctuation?

Now I know there is only so many characters you can use on these signs.  And I know we’ve all got a bit sloppy with things in this fast-paced, text-messaging days in which we all live.  

But there’s always space for a full stop or a question mark at the end of a sentence, isn’t there.  Oh look, I’ve just done it again.

Kids Say the Funniest Things (part 89)

A snapshot of a choice encounter whilst taking my eldest (10 years old) to cubs one evening with one of his friends:

My eldest: “You’ll never guess what I found in my Shreddies this morning – a big, thick, curly hair!  Eurghh!”

Eldest’s friend: [without a hint of irony or sarcasm] “Yeah, that’ll be from one of the nanas that knitted them.”

My eldest: “Yeah.”

Oh, to be a 10 year old boy again!

Kids Say the Funniest Things (part 71)

Another corker from my youngest on a recent family holiday to the Lake District – the conversation somehow got onto eye-brows.  Eye-brows to you and me; eye-browns to my youngest.

Despite much hilarity and explanation from her two older siblings, she was insistent that eye-brows are in fact called eye-browns.  Because they’re brown.

You can’t fault the logic, so for the avoidance of doubt, I give you eye-browns:

Eye-browns ...

 As opposed to Eye-blonds:

... Eye-blondes ...

Or even Eye-gingers:

... Eye-gingers

Twitter: we wos robbed!

News comes today that Sunderland striker Darren Bent has stopped tweeting to concentrate on his football.  It comes after he landed himself in trouble a few months ago for issuing a number of ill-advised tweets, about which other football clubs he would and wouldn’t join.

He’s not the first person to land themselves in trouble for revealing too much about themselves through their Twitter entries.

Witness Please Rob Me, a site which has just launched which tells burglars which houses are likely to be empty – based on information unwittingly provided by Twitter users.  The apparent real objective of the site is to warn people of the potential side effects of inadvertently revealing too much about yourself through your tweets.

Please Rob Me

Perhaps Darren Bent has taken heed of Please Rob Me.  He wouldn’t be the first high-profile British footballer to have his house burgled when he was known to be miles away from home, on a pitch, kicking a ball about.

So, the message from Please Rob Me is – be careful what you Twitter.  You could end up revealing much more than you had intended.  On the other hand, you could do us all a favour and just follow Darren Bent’s example of simply hanging up your Twitter boots.

Kids Say the Funniest Things (part 26)

As a father of three, my kids are a continual source of amusement and entertainment to me.  Whether they mean to be or not.

For me, the amusement started in the days before my own delightful offspring arrived, with a trip to some family friends.  Their three year old was just coming to grips with the finer points of language, but hadn’t quite got the hang of different categories of poultry.   Quite logically, therefore, he referred to ducks not as ducks, but instead as “chicken boats”.  I’ll leave you to work it out.

Not to be outdone, my eldest (when he was really still quite young) was playing in the street with his wee pals, when he started talking about a “goat’s car”.  I was perplexed, and on closer inspection his infantile ramblings had nothing to do with animals, but instead he was talking about his friend’s go-kart.  Needless to say, from that point forward, in my family go-karts are now called “goat’s cars”.

Go Kart

Goat’s Car

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few months later, he had me in stitches again.  He was helping me in the kitchen preparing a meal.  Each ingredient which came to hand was met with a constant barrage of questions.  “What’s this, Daddy?”, “What are those, Daddy?”.  I picked up some whole nutmegs, preparing to grate them.  The question came.  I explained, “this is a spice, and it’s called nutmeg“.  “Ah!” came the knowing response, “duck eggs”.

Nutmegs

Duck Eggs

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kids really do say the funniest things.  Hey, maybe somebody should make a TV programme about it?

Plain English or Plain Crazy?

The Local Government Association’s push to outlaw certain words and phrases begs more questions than it answers, and will cause problems for suppliers.

Today, the Local Government Association published a list of 200 words which, it says, should not be used by Local Councils.  You can view the full list at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7949077.stm.

The LGA’s intention is perfectly understandable; they want to promote clear communication through the use of plain English.  After all, I don’t think there are many people who want phrases such as “Predictors of Beaconicity” trotted out, and less still who would have the vaguest clue what it actually means.

But from my company’s perspective (Company Net), as a supplier of software services to organisations which include Local Councils, the LGA’s latest mandate presents more than a few problems.   For a start, phrases such as “functionality”, “scoping”, “protocols”, “transactional”, “parameter” and “toolkit” are all outlawed, all of which are common parlance within the software development fraternity. 

In an operational sense (an area close to my heart), other phrases are on the hit-list.  I’m not allowed to talk about “resource allocation” any longer; the word “framework” is also banished.  But why stop there?  Why not ban methodologies as well?  “Outputs” are forbidden, but somewhat bizarrely, “inputs” are not.  Perhaps this suggests that that there was no “outcome” (another word for the scrap-heap), because the inputs were never “actioned” (and another).  No doubt the participants were too busy playing ‘buzzword bingo’ instead of getting on with the task in hand.

Buzzword Bingo

Perhaps we should be keeping such ‘geek-speak’ words and phrases to ourselves, and not unleashing them on the customer.  Personally, I have no problem with this.

However, where it becomes particularly problematic is in the conventional language of software delivery projects which is required in the “interface” (whoops, there’s another word on the hit-list) between the software consultancy and customer.  “Single point of contact” is now forbidden.  Show me a customer who doesn’t want a single point of contact?  It just doesn’t make sense.

Company Net likes to establish “partnerships” with its customers.  We strive to work through “collaboration”, to have “dialogue” with our customers.  All these words are forbidden.  In working through the “engagement” (another no-no), we have discussions about “priorities”, and we often seek to develop the software by “iterations”.  Well, not any more we don’t; not when we’re working with Local Government.

And heaven forbid, what happens when we may (very occasionally) deviate from plan?  The word “slippage” has been banned; its suggested replacement being “delay”.  Slippage is a far more evocative word.  It implies a significant element of the accidental or unintended, which in a project delivery sense is usually the case.  No-one intends to be late; whereas delays can be intentional.

Finally, there’s the issue of what we call our Local Government customers.  “Customers” is no longer an option; and “Clients” is a no-go area too.  Perhaps we should refer to our customers as “they who pay the bill” – in an effort to follow the Germanic model of concatenating several words within a single word to convey a precise and very definite meaning.  The often-referenced example of this method is the German word for ‘matchbox’ – ‘Streichholzschaechtelchen’.  This is derived from ‘Streich’ meaning rubbing, ‘holz’ meaning wood, ‘Schaechtel’ meaning box, and ‘chen’ meaning little.  But, on second thoughts, given that most non-German speakers struggle to even voice this word, perhaps this isn’t such a great idea.  Language needs to be communicable as well as understandable.

Aside from the linguistic considerations, there is also the matter of freedom of speech.  Who are the LGA to tell us what we can and can’t say? 

No-one wants to be stuck in a meeting where gobbledegook is the (dare I say it?) linguafranca.   But at the end of the day, it all comes down to semantics; the purpose of language is to make yourself understood.  If you are not understood, your language has failed you. 

With a few exceptions (does anyone know what “coterminosity” actually means, and why use “promulgate” when declare will suffice?), there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using most of the words on LGA’s banned list.  The proviso is that these should be used appropriately, and used to convey meaning and understanding with the bare minimum of extraneous explanation.  A “Level Playing Field” is a fantastic, evocative phrase which should be celebrated, not outlawed.  In three short words, it promotes instant understanding.  So, why use a paragraph when 3 words will suffice?  It’s all about the speaker and the listener being on the same wavelength.  And, for now, “wavelength” is a word which we are all free to use.