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| Brian Regan - Serving Size | ||||
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My team had a party to celebrate launching AWS Elastic Beanstalk (we launched in January). This was the big shindig, where everyone was encouraged to bring significant others, and all of the other teams involved in helping us launch got to hang out and have some free food & beer.
Kathryn came along with me. She was a bit nervous that the evening would devolve into geeky technobabble and she'd be completely lost. As much as I try and filter myself, sometimes I do slip into computer lingo. Or I simply forget that the lingo I'm using isn't widely understood outside the tech industry. Such conversations typically happen when I'm talking about my day:
"I just spent 4 hours in sprint planning."
"Sprint planning?"
"Yeah, what we're going to be working on next sprint."
"What's a sprint?"
"Oh, it's just 3 weeks worth of work."
"Are you always sprinting?"
"Yep"
"So then how is it a sprint?"
No surprise, software engineering has a particularly dense vernacular of common words used in uncommon ways. I don't bother to question how they're used, because when I learned them I just treated them as new words. It doesn't matter what "sprint" means in other contexts, in this context, a "sprint" is a time-bound span of work. But that just doesn't seem to work for Kathryn.
So when our cocktail party conversation drifted towards work, the overused engineering lingo reared its ugly head again. Kathryn still didn't understand why we'd overused these words in this manner, so she asked the group. Bill, a coworker who is particularly good at explaining things, tried to answer her.
"But you're not going any faster. You're always sprinting"
"But you see, it's different from Waterfall, where it took years to release updates. Now it's on the order of weeks. It's much faster."
"But you're still working at the same speed. Sprinting should be when you have to work extra hard or extra fast to get things done. The normal speed of working should just be called Doing Your Fucking Job."
...
Later on, Bill tried to explain software engineering principles in general. "It's all part of this process," he said, "Scrum is how you can develop software more quickly."
He paused. "Are you familiar with what a scrum is?"
She thought for a second. Then, it came to her, "Oh yeah, from rugby?"
"Yeah, exactly like a scrum in rugby."
"So you bash heads together and don't go very far or very fast?"
We laughed. Yes. Sometimes, that's exactly what agile development feels like.
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