Sunday, January 31, 2010

Truth be told


The IT industry in particular has been guilty of over using (read misusing) acronyms and phrases, the
real meaning of which is not known to many, in and outside the industry. The following is an honest attempt for people at large to get to know or revive their knowledge about few such phrases.

Certain terms or phrases used are developer centric but I still believe you would have over heard it while walking past a cluster of developers talking to themselves. The list was never meant to be exhaustive, so inject your own and help educate the people at large (the good people who aren’t part of this typical industry).

  • Alpha – a synonym often used in place of the disclaimer clause in relation to software

  • Beta – the deliberate act of making people dependant on software that you know doesn’t work the way it is supposed to.

  • Unit Testing – It’s taking responsibility for the subsequent ill effects of the code you wrote.

  • Integration Testing – the act of shifting the responsibility above to some other person or module.

  • Dependency Injection – the art of writing code that you know will crash, but making sure you alone can fix it. In current scenario, this is the only way to have  job security in the software development industry.

  • Community Technology Preview (CTP) – the only way whereby a company gets testers for free.

  • Release Candidate (RC) – the difference between a CTP and a working release of software.

  • Project Manager (PM) – A mysterious organism over engrossed in excel whole day long, meetings for whom marks the coolest way to chill out.

Post in your comments and assist in carrying this list to the next level (Beta 2 to be specific).

Happy Coding!