S

Posted on by george jeffry

SAFe:

  1. Waterfall.
  2. It’s just like agile with not so much agile innit.

Sandbox:

  1. A programmer’s machine, data, and code.
  2. The only place the release candidate works properly on the day it is released.

Scaffold:

  1. Support structure for certain ropes, familiar to sheriffs and Clint Eastwood wild-west movie-goers.
  2. Application structures familiar to the condemned in new-west data-centric application tools.

As the condemned was heard to say at the reprieve, “No noose is good noose.”

Schedule:

  1. Along with Budget, the only other real requirement in any project.
  2. An estimate wrapped in an approximation concealed behind a guess.
  3. That part of a requirements analysis that depends on the available monies and the willingness of the technical staff to work for free.
  4. A fabrication, overlaid on a calendar, showing artifacts abutting jargon.

Scrum:

  1. A methodology for restarting a project every two weeks by forcing the developers into a tight circle and exerting every ounce of strength to gain control of the project. Unfortunately for all players, the project manager stole the project well before they arrived and there is nothing, really, over which to wrestle.
  2. The professional manager’s declaration that no software team can self-organize without the supervisory involvement of a professional manager.
  3. Rigid methodology that defines flexibility as one of its primary goals.
  4. Agile process in which individuals and interactions are reduced to immutable roles, strict methodologies, and endless meetings all in the pursuit of freeing developers and projects from immutable roles, strict methodologies, and endless meetings.
  5. Convenient management legerdemain where the producers are cajoled into performing all management tasks, collecting all management deliverables each week, and handing those over to the middle-manager who will then take all the credit for the effort with his superiors. According to the manager, this must be done in order for the producers to be liberated from management responsibilities.

Scrum Lord:

  1. The non-technical barnacle inside an otherwise-efficient software development team who admonishes the software developers for inefficiency.
  2. An inventor of words and ceremonies that serially explain his own inability to transform a highly-skilled and experienced team into a highly-skilled and experienced team that will redirect all credit to him.
  3. A middle manager, devoid of experience in software development who, having attended a weekend seminar in scrumly-lordly things, carries a certification that elevates him in the org chart over the software developers who may have as many as thirty more years experience than him.
  4. The expert anointed by executive management to explain to highly skilled and experienced software developers that the reason this project remains at risk is because they fail to incorporate emotional and soft skills – that have no effect on the quality or integrity of the code – into their daily ceremonies.
  5. The Walrus (or the Carpenter) – played by the scrum lord – in the chapter of Through The Looking Glass, where they meet the oysters – played by the software developers.

‘The time has come,’ the Scrum Lord said,
      To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
      Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
      And whether pigs have wings.’

apologies to Lewis Carroll

Second Set of Eyes (SSE):

  1. Using two people to overlook the huge problem with the code.
  2. A reviewer of lesser skill, empowered by a project manager to review code in an environment manipulated to put the reviewer in a state of awe.
  3. Busybody; snoop.
  4. A manager who always begins every disagreement with, “well, the way I see it…“

Security:

  1. Team or department at the employer tasked with escorting the most recent former developer to the front desk after that developer cracks and states the obvious in an emotion-filled rant or collapse.
  2. Those tools or processes intended to keep chickens in and wolves out, but which always ignore the principle need of automation: which is to keep the hen-house door open and let outsiders in to collect the eggs.

The only way for one to succeed is for the other to fail; even in part.

Server:

  1. The person who expectorates into your food before delivering it.
  2. The machine that expectorates into your data or process before delivering it.
  3. A piece of hardware with enough horsepower to make your slow and inefficient program usable in the real world.

Client: Server! Oh, server! What is this fly doing in my data?
Server: Cartesian Joins!(ba-dump)

Service Bus:

  1. To the manager, the vehicle for delivering easy and secure functionality in a cross platform environment using inepensive and well-understood protocols.
  2. To the developer, the modern-day re-enactment of the hours and days immediately after God confused the Babelonians by cursing each with a different language and then daring them to finish the tower.
  3. Public conveyance for services, with inconvenient routes, dirty protocols, and questionable riders.
  4. The vehicle under which consultants are tossed whenever a project is going badly.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA):

  1. Pinning the entire project to a mirage based on a programmer’s hallucination.
  2. The approach that allows the architect to draw a big box in the middle titled services. Inside the box he writes, And then a miracle happens. This is handed to the designer.

This is the thing that’s gonna save the bad manager’s project, right?

SharePoint(c):

A complex platform often mistaken for a simple solution.

Simple (Design):

Incomplete

Simple (Program):

Hello World

Simple (Solution):

Inadequate

Software Architect

  1. The Buck Stops Here (The CIO remains a blameless, holy creature)
  2. The common JD for architect must have at least 20 bullet points, only two of which vaguely reference either software or architecture.
  3. Overpaid middle manager.
  4. Underpaid scapegoat.
  5. Raised to face artillery in battle; pulling a plow in a kale field.
  6. Icharus, repeated by narcissistic developers or ignorant project managers.
  7. Whoever might take up the righteous call to consider the user first, the purpose second, and the topology third in all software development decisions; and then blaspheme the office through anti-pattern, vandalizing each and every commitment with delight.

Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC)

  1. The formal process by which an idea becomes a concept which becomes an experiment which becomes a product which is shown to have problems and which are fixed and the product is released as another product and the whole cycle begins anew.
  2. A well-known term for a non-existent solution to an eternal problem.
  3. The ability to plan the funeral and interment of a project before the gestation period is complete.

Software Engineer:

  1. And I thought I was going to get to run the train.
  2. An embarrassed programmer who is insecure about his title.
  3. Bad programmer who has set forth on an academic pursuit to discover why he’s bad in the same way a psychology major seeks to discover why he’s crazy.
  4. One who, mistaking software development for bridge-building, seeks to apply the absolutely incompatible tools of the construction trades to the process of painting a Renoir.
  5. Clever and harassed former developer who, recognizing that buyers of art software are rarely capable of understanding it, undertakes the lucrative profession of art critic software engineering.

Software Project Management:

  1. Application of regular control processes on unpredictable events and undisciplined participants.
  2. Process imprisonment within the development gulag where order can finally be maintained because there exists no hope of code release.
  3. Software engineers who, after reading Ecclesiastes 3, still believe there is something redeemable about software development.

To every task there is a sprint, and a time to every component under management:
A time to release, and a time to deprecate; a time to seed the hash, and a time for dictionary attacks;
A time to fork, and a time to merge; a time to BSOD, and a time to reinstall;
A time to peek, and a time to poke; a time to burn, and a time to copy;
A time to cast away consultants, and a time to gather consultants together; 
A time to form consensus, and a time to refrain from buy-in;
A time to get, and a time to put; a time to persist, and a time to empty;
A time to parse, and a time to concatenate; a time to spin down, and a time to interface;
A time to fanboi, and a time to freetard; a time of platform bigotry, and a time of cross-platform.

Sprint:

  1. Race to beat the racing judge to the end of the run before he changes course.
  2. The scrum answer to “sustainable pace.”
  3. The method that assures that the tortoise wins the race.
  4. Arbitrary and capricious constraint that assures all developers reach failure and exhaustion simultaneously.
  5. Modern management’s marriage of Sisyphus and Icarus: doomed to tragically fail to reach a goal within sight of it, and then cursed to repeat the attempt throughout eternity.

SQL:

Usually referencing Microsoft SQL Server. Pronounced SQUEAL for reasons the mature programmer understands.

Standards:

  1. My way of doing things.
  2. Measurable properties that always come out the same because of the uncanny way yardsticks stretch and contract in the software universe.

State:

  1. Any property of a domain that can change and can be measured.
  2. A condition of instability common to all projects; e.g., this project is in a state.
  3. A large political jurisdiction in the United States for which no clear equivalent exists in any other nation, thereby offering programmers another opportunity to invent a new solution for mapping a new data equivalent, thereby violating lexicographic domains and corrupting data states; e.g., these state data domains are in a state.

Statement of Work (SOW):

  1. Blueprint.
  2. Constitutional declaration by the consultant regarding the limited rights of the client and the bounded obligations of the consultant.
  3. Annotated map for guiding a client to the new application world.
  4. Weapon of choice used by ill-prepared managers when taking on misunderstood projects with disagreeable partners.

Stored Procedure:

  1. What Web Services would look like without the invention of the Internet.
  2. Serial attempts at programming executed by DBAs because they usually won’t let programmers into the “Programmability” area of SQL Server.

Do not lay up for yourselves logic and algorithm where assembly doth corrupt and hacks break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves 4GL which is already corrupt and where thieves are already writing the algorithm.

Stylesheet:

  1. How graphic artists found work in IT.
  2. The unnecessary portion of most functionless web sites.

Section E of the local newspaper.



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