Chaos Program

I learned an interesting lesson at my job today.

Our team recently gained a member who is trained in user experience stuff, actual testing and measuring it, not just eyeballing it like me. During a couple meetings lately, we’ve discussed the language used on the web site. We’ve changed the terminology a couple times during the course of development as we thought of new implications and also as we struggled to describe the technology in ways that people who are new to it can understand. When you’ve been working on a project for a couple years, learning how to talk about it to people who are brand new to it can be a challenge.

What do you mean you don’t understand what a child node is? It’s a node directly linked by a default or alternate path from a parent! (Note: Never end this type of sentence with words like “dummy,” “idiot,” “moron” or anything similar. For some reason it doesn’t go over well.) (See here for a partial explanation of child node)

One result of the changes in terminology is that the web site is inconsistent. Sometimes it uses one term, sometimes an older one that is no longer approved. This might be because we forgot to change it or it might be because someone was writing stuff and forgot that we had changed the term. An attentive reader might be thinking, “Ah! So you learned you should thoroughly edit everything when you make changes, maybe even have copy written by a professional who will be focused on the words and not think of them as a distraction from the real job of hacking code!” This would be wrong. Nice try though.
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