{"id":103448,"date":"2020-02-18T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=103448"},"modified":"2020-02-17T19:15:15","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T03:15:15","slug":"20200218-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20200218-00\/?p=103448","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: Click stop"},"content":{"rendered":"

A term that is beginning to gain currency at Microsoft is click stop<\/i>. Here are a few citations. See if you can figure it out.<\/p>\n

Document title: Features Available at Click Stop 1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Components should view mode X as a click stop toward switching to mode Y.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We have decided to have a click stop at MVP<\/a> and another after all Priority 1 features are complete.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In its most general sense, a click stop<\/i> is a reference point in an otherwise continuous range.<\/p>\n

It derives from the photography term which describes detents on a camera lens aperture dial. Although you can set the aperture to any value you like, the notches make it easier to set the aperture to one of a handful of commonly-used values.<\/p>\n

In Microspeak, the term is usually used to refer to points in the development of a software product. These key moments are a time to pause and reflect, taking time to assess the state of the product more thoroughly.<\/p>\n

In other words, it’s a fancy synonym for milestone<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Although that is the original intended meaning of the term click stop<\/i>, that didn’t stop the term from being used in other completely different ways. I suspect that what happened is that the term was coined spontaneously by some senior executive who was a photography enthusiast, and everybody was afraid to ask what it meant, so each person came away with their own idea of its definition. I’ve noted earlier that a nontrivial source of Microspeak is the desire to impress upper management<\/a>. Everybody wants to use the term, even if they don’t know what it means.<\/p>\n

These mutated versions of the term click stop<\/i> are never defined in the documents they are found in. Defining the term would betray that you aren’t “hip” and “with-it”. You just throw the term out there and hope it makes you sound like senior management material.<\/p>\n

Click Stop 2 is defined as users in markets where feature X is not available. Users can also end up in this Click Stop if the feature has been disabled by Group Policy. Users can be in Click Stop 2 and Click Stop 4 at the same time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This document thinks that a click stop<\/i> is a way of categorizing different types of users, and that click stops can overlap. This doesn’t mesh well with the original aperture dial detent<\/i> sense of click stop<\/i>; you can’t set a dial to two values at the same time.<\/p>\n

But that never stopped them.<\/p>\n

Some sort of prize needs to be awarded to the author of this sentence which I found in a different document:<\/p>\n

Industry adoption of feature X will move us toward our North Star<\/a> click stop.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Being able to incorporate multiple Microspeak terms into a single sentence proves that you’re ready to be promoted to senior management.<\/p>\n

Bonus chatter<\/b>: One of my colleagues thinks that North Star Click Stop<\/i> sounds like the name of a great Seattle gastropub.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A place to pause and refresh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-103448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

A place to pause and refresh.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}