On 06/10/05, Elizabeth Keogh <ekeogh@...> wrote:
>
>
> I've never quite grasped what XP means by a metaphor, which annoys me
> because I love metaphor and analogy.
>
> Do you have any examples you could please share of when you have used
> metaphors, what the metaphor was and how it helped you?
>
The last one I recall using, I think, was a fishing boat one. It's a
metaphor I'd seen used before, and might be quite a common one. It's use
might have been influenced by the fact my client was in a major fishing
city.
The metaphor was for a polling mechanism. A poller had to check a database
and several directories for some XML messages. This was replaced by a
fishing boat fishing in various fishing grounds. We wanted a maximum of 200
messages fetched at any one time, so we imposed fishing quotas. The business
team got quite into it, they even reported defects in terms of the metaphor.
Like - "When the fisherman goes to this fishing ground, he seems to have a
hole in his net.".
It made for good fun. Sometimes it was taken a little far, like when we
found issues in Bugzilla talking about the boat running aground between
fishing zones. - One of services on which the poller depended was a bit
flaky, causing to poller to appear to stop.
I've never worked with a client where I've thought "if I don't have a
metaphor, I won't be able to talk to these guys." YMMV
Cheers,
Tim


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