Greetings readers,
let us embrace the most dropped part of extreme programming and be stubborn enough about it to run into it, get frustrated, be tempted to drop it and haggle it to the ground using a large amount of rubber bands, coffee and persistence: The system metaphor.
My plan right now is to walk through the proven system metaphors, and brainstorm some more, think about the metaphor and pick one that feels good, whereas good stands for “Does not sound completely akward.” I will call the system from now on “a development community for hint-throughs”, as this is a consistent, concise description of the system which can be easily put into the sentence “SYSTEM is an METAPHOR”.
Brainstormed metaphors
- Proven Metaphor: Spreadsheet
- A development community for hint-throughs is like a spreadsheet. Uh. the hint-throughs are like cells, while the users operate on those cells. Uh. What?!
- Proven Metaphor; Script
- A development community for hint-throughs is like a theatre script. I don’t think this works, as a script is mostly a sequence of actions, while the community pretty much a bunch of people working on a certain set of artifacts, developing, improving and consuming them.
- Spontanetous idea: Library
- The development system for a development community for hint-throughs is a library. Inside this library, there are librarians performing certain tasks, like “Fetching an entire hint-through” or “Fetching a certain page of a hint-through”. They do this by doing this and asking other librarians to do things. The hint-throughs are books, with a cover (containing author information, hint-through information, …), and pages containing actual content (and pages refer to each other). Futhermore, there are meeting places, like the cafeteria inside the library where the users can meet if they wish to dos o. Besides that, users ask the librarians to do whatever they want them to do. I like this.
I think I will stick with the idea of a library, involving shelves containing the hint-throughs and librarians who require a certain amount of information in order to go and retrieve books according to this.
I am not entirely convinced if this metaphor is strong enough or useful in any way, however, several of the papers and pages I looked at basically state that getting the metaphor right is really, really hard. Thus, I will pick this one, accept the risk to run into problems and be ready to refine the metaphor. I just want to have one and get experience at choosing a metaphor.
I think this is a good short post with a nice amount of progress. I am going to work on the estimations and the release plan now, I think,
Tetha.
