I work with a bunch of extremely smart, extremely talented software developers. There’s no denying that seriously hard-core techies have a secret language they use to communicate. It doesn’t have to be in 1’s and 0’s, but it can still be unintelligible to those outside the caste. So we are going behind the scenes to reveal ten of the most commonly used phrases by developers – and what they really mean!
10: “That’s a nice-to-have feature”
The real meaning is: “Are you crazy!? We have to figure out how to make the software actually work first”
9: “I am not an expert in <insert technology name>”
The real meaning is: “I may well be an expert in this technology, but I will never admit to it because I like to be modest”
8: “The complexity was under-estimated”
The real meaning is: “Aha! Now I finally understand what we need to do!”
7: “I’d like to tweak the design”
The real meaning is: “Now that I finally understand what we need to do, it’s time to throw everything out and start again.”
6: The customer is using it wrong
The real meaning is: “You asked me to design a toaster and now you’ve told the customer it can bake the bread”.
5: You’re a manager – you wouldn’t understand.
The real meaning is: “The amount of energy necessary to translate the technical explanation into something you might understand is greater than the total energy in the universe!”
4: The tester isn’t testing it in field conditions.
The real meaning is: “That tester is good… s/he has figured out ways to break my software that I never even imagined!”
3: How long is a piece of string?
The real meaning is: “You’ve asked me to estimate something but I have no idea what the context is – please give me a few assumption I can use to come up with a reasonable estimate”
2: The asynchronous SNR module has created a race condition so that the state machine’s stability renders the RCA status inaccurate and it will take a week to fix.”
The real meaning is: “There is a problem that will definitely take longer than a week to fix!”
1: That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The real meaning is: “Yes, that is indeed a bug, but it would be really hard to fix, so maybe we can dress it up and call it a feature?”
Thankfully, if you choose the Aspira Software development team to take on some software development work for you, you will never* hear any of our developers use one of the above phrases, because they recognize that good communication is a critical part of any software development project.
*By never, we mean hardly ever, or at least not every day.
For all queries please contact 021-2352550 or 01-5175777 www.aspira.ie
