2006-06-27
Southern hemisphere
I’m living in Gouda. It’s somewhere on the northern hemisphere. Quite regularly I have to go to my office on the southern hemisphere. Early in the morning I leave. I follow a path on the globe, take the meridian, cross the equator and stop halfway the southern hemisphere. In the evening I cross the equator again and go home. I’m doing this several times a week… by bike. Well, it’s not that far. Just 10 minutes. Now, the really funny thing is that the southern hemisphere is on the northern hemisphere. And someone has made a mistake when he positioned the equator south of the southern hemisphere. You have probably already guessed what I’m talking about. The address of my office is Southern Hemisphere 1 in Gouda. It’s the name of the street. The Meridian, the Equator, Northern Hemisphere, they’re all streets. It’s just a matter of definition.
Mixing up definitions is one of the big problems with my job. Someone reports that the alarm is not properly handled by the system. Which one? There are many different alarms on several levels. Or someone has found an error in the exported data. I look at the exported data, but cannot find the data he’s talking about. After some enquiries it turns out that he’s talking about the table in the website, not about the export files.
People are often very careless in their communication. Somehow we still succeed to understand each other. But most of the time we just think that we understand the other. It’s the art of miscommunication.
Due to my experience with improper definitions I always pay much attention to what I’m saying. So is my daughter. Yesterday she gave me a little lecture.
“Daddy, this is not what you told me.”
“Sorry, what’s wrong with the carrots and the burger? I asked whether you wanted fennel and chicken or carrots and burger. You opted for the carrots and chicken.”
“Yes, but this here”, she’s pointing at the rice, “you didn’t mention that.”
“The rice? What’s wrong with the rice? It was part of the both options.”
“Yes daddy, but you didn’t mention it.”
“You mean you didn’t expect it. Did you want tortellini with carrots? Sorry, I didn’t think about that.”
The practice of requirements engineering in a nutshell.
Mixing up definitions is one of the big problems with my job. Someone reports that the alarm is not properly handled by the system. Which one? There are many different alarms on several levels. Or someone has found an error in the exported data. I look at the exported data, but cannot find the data he’s talking about. After some enquiries it turns out that he’s talking about the table in the website, not about the export files.
People are often very careless in their communication. Somehow we still succeed to understand each other. But most of the time we just think that we understand the other. It’s the art of miscommunication.
Due to my experience with improper definitions I always pay much attention to what I’m saying. So is my daughter. Yesterday she gave me a little lecture.
“Daddy, this is not what you told me.”
“Sorry, what’s wrong with the carrots and the burger? I asked whether you wanted fennel and chicken or carrots and burger. You opted for the carrots and chicken.”
“Yes, but this here”, she’s pointing at the rice, “you didn’t mention that.”
“The rice? What’s wrong with the rice? It was part of the both options.”
“Yes daddy, but you didn’t mention it.”
“You mean you didn’t expect it. Did you want tortellini with carrots? Sorry, I didn’t think about that.”
The practice of requirements engineering in a nutshell.
# posted by Sander @ 23:53 
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