The Old New Thing

Microspeak - The Old New Thing

Microspeak: Future-proofing

February 2, 2010 Feb 2, 2010 02/2/10
Raymond Chen
It has been famously said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same holds true for Microspeak. In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about extensibility: Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future, often by outside parties. For example, an ...

Microspeak: Zap

January 26, 2010 Jan 26, 2010 01/26/10
Raymond Chen
You may hear an old-timer developer use the verb zap. That proposed fix will work. Until everybody gets the fix, they can just zap the assert. The verb to zap means to replace a breakpoint instruction with an appropriate number of NOP instructions (effectively ignoring it). The name comes from the old Windows 2.x kernel debugger. (...

Microspeak: Net out

November 3, 2009 Nov 3, 2009 11/3/09
Raymond Chen
It started out in finance, but the term has crept into more mainstream usage (at least within Microsoft) and along the way picked up its own meaning: Where did we net out on this? Customers want you to net out the business value. Note any significant changes to the forecast and explain the reasons why. Net out changes to start ...

Proto-Microspeak: Efforting

October 6, 2009 Oct 6, 2009 10/6/09
Raymond Chen
I have only two citations, so it may not be proper Microspeak. We're efforting that for you. They're not just trying, they're efforting. Solution efforting seems to fall in a gap between teams so there's no clear owner or resourcing focused on it. Bonus jargon: resourcing. Actually, that one sentence came from a longer document packed ...

Microspeak: Net net

September 29, 2009 Sep 29, 2009 09/29/09
Raymond Chen
In finance, the net is the total after you have cancelled positive values against negative values. For example, if you took in $30 and paid out $20, then your net is $10. In Microspeak, this term has moved into project planning and has undergone redoubling, so it's not just net; it's net net. The doubling of the word was probably added to ...

Management-speak: Focus

September 10, 2009 Sep 10, 2009 09/10/09
Raymond Chen
Management likes to use the word focus. They like it so much, that anything important is called a focus. That's an interesting scenario, one which we hope to address, but it's not our main focus. We're focusing on three features for this release. But how can you focus on more than one thing? The first citation implies that there's more ...

Microspeak: Action on

August 18, 2009 Aug 18, 2009 08/18/09
Raymond Chen
I have been fortunate to have been spared exposure to this particular corner of Microspeak, but others have not been so lucky. Have you actioned on this ask? It's not clear whether actioning on something means that you've started it or you've finished it. As a result, this is another case of using jargon to impede communication. The ...

Proto-Microspeak: Coceptualize

July 21, 2009 Jul 21, 2009 07/21/09
Raymond Chen
Many years ago, to see whether anybody was paying attention, a colleague and I slipped the made-up word "coceptualize" into a document. Nobody said a thing. Either nobody read that part of the document, or they did and thought it was a real word...

Microspeak: The plan for the plan

June 30, 2009 Jun 30, 2009 06/30/09
Raymond Chen
I ran across an old document that contained a phrase I hadn't heard before: The Plan for the Plan for the XYZ Team Summary XYZ is at ZBB and we are now at a recall class only bug bar until RTM. The team has also started working on a plan for a plan to address the requests made from the XYZ Leadership Team several months ago. Details of ...