March 8th, 2011

Microspeak: Cadence

Originally, the term cadence meant the rate at which a regular event recurs, possibly with variations, but with an overall cycle that repeats. For example, the cadence for team meetings might be “Every Monday, with a longer meeting on the last meeting of each month.”

Project X is on a six-month release cadence, whereas Project Y takes two to three years between releases.

Q: What was the cadence of email requests you sent out to drive contributions?

A: We started with an announcement in September, with two follow-up messages in the next month.

In what I suspect is a case of I want to use this cool word other people are using, even though I don’t know exactly what it means, the term has been applied more broadly to mean schedule or timeline, even for nonrecurring events. Sample usage: “What is our cadence for making this available outside the United States?”

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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