Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Tribal knowledge

At my day job, I keep running into word-walls, where the evident meaning of the words is not what the text is trying to convey. So, we have an "application accelerator" that does not accelerate the application. Evidently, it accelerates the process of creating the application, and what happens after that is up to the developer. We have an "autogenerated" modal window that turns out not to be autogenerated, or not in the sense I would understand that term. I still have to tell it what I want in the window and how I want it to look.

Probably what I am running up against is the speed of development of our product. It had its cranky places in times past, and you had to have a large chunk of "tribal knowledge" in order to make it work at all. And now it is much more simple and straightforward for anyone who ever used the older versions. But I did not. I am only seven months here, so my baseline is what everyone else things of as this huge advance over the past. What they want to trumpet as wonderful improvements, I see normal or almost-normal software behavior.

This would be funny if it did result in my wasting so much time tracking down where my understanding does not match the expectations of the team with good tribal knowledge.

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