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In Microspeak, fit is a predicate noun which is never used on its own but always comes with a modifying adjective. For something to be a good fit is for something to be appropriate or suitable for a particular situation. The opposite of a good fit is not a bad fit , because that's pejorative. Rather...

Reader laonianren wanted to know more about this game Walls and Ladders . "Walls and Ladders" is not a game. It's just a metaphor for a conflict in which one side wants to perform some action and the other side wants to prevent it. The defending side builds a wall, and the attacking side builds...

Sure, any noun can be verbed, and any verb can be nouned. But today, we're going to noun an adjective. I have no written citations of this usage; the only report was via a colleague who overheard it in a hallway conversion. I had some offlines with Fred about that. In Microspeak, offline...

In mathematics, a level set is the set of points at which a function takes a particular value. This has nothing to do with the way the term is used at Microsoft. In fact, the way the term is used at Microsoft, I have no idea what it means. But here are citations. The first is from an upper-level...

In its most general sense, the term bug farm refers to something that is a rich source of bugs. It is typically applied to code which is nearly unmaintainable. Code can arrive in this state through a variety of means. Poor initial design. An initial design that has been pushed far beyond its...

Everybody knows about the Microspeak term dogfood . It refers to the practice of taking the product you are working on and using it in production .¹ For the Windows team, it means installing a recent build of Windows on your own computer as well as onto a heavily-used file server . For the Office...

I'll start with the citation from a hypothetical conversation: "This is being handled by Jonathan Swift." — Who does he report through? "He reports up through Jane Austen's org." The Microspeak term report through (or report up through ) comes up often in situations where...

The Operations group at Microsoft manage the servers which keep the company running. And they have their own jargon which is puzzling to those of us who don't spend all our days in a noisy server room. Unplanned Unplanned Outage Planned Unplanned Outage Immediate Deployment Timeframe . This...

The game PowerPoint-Karaoke was invented in 2006 by Zentrale Ingelligenz Agentur . In this game, contestants are called upon to give a PowerPoint presentation based on a slide deck they have never seen. (The German spelling uses a hyphen between the two words. When "translated" into English, the hyphen...

A friend of mind was asked out of the blue, "What does hypo mean?" She started to flash back to high school English class and Greek word roots. "I've started to hear it everywhere. Like Everyone in that meeting is a hypo or We need to reach out to hypos ." My friend realized that she had...

Originally, the term cadence meant the rate at which a regular event recurs , possibly with variations, but with an overall cycle that repeats. For example, the cadence for team meetings might be "Every Monday, with a longer meeting on the last meeting of each month." Project X is on a six-month...

To recycle bits (or recycle electrons ) is to take an old piece of email and use it to answer a similar (often identical) question or discussion on a mailing list. This is usually done by simply replying to the thread with the two-word message "Recycling bits" (or "Recycling electrons") and attaching...

At Microsoft, leverage is not a term of physics whereby a force can be magnified by the application of mechanical advantage. It is also not a term of finance whereby the power of a small amount of money can be magnified by the assumption of debt. In fact, at Microsoft, the word leverage isn't even a...

Microspeak is not always about changing a word from a verb to a noun or changing a noun to a verb or even changing a noun into a verb and then back into a noun . Sometimes it's about data compression. This testing won't inform RC , but we'll need it to inform an RTM release. First, you need...

At Microsoft, the take-away is the essential message of a presentation or the conclusion that you are expected to draw from a situation. It is something you are expected to remember when the whole thing is over, a piece of information you take away with you as you leave the room. XYZ demo take away...

I introduced this Microspeak last year as part of a general entry about management-speak, but I'm giving it its own entry because it deserves some attention on its own. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way...

In the Customer Service and Support part of Microsoft, you will often see the term funnel . Here are some citations: Effectively and efficiently solve issues by driving levers across the entire funnel. Putting the Fun in Funnel. Strengthening the front of the funnel. The funnel is a way...

A colleague of mine visited an internal Web site for task ABC and found that the site was no longer there. Instead it was replaced with a simple message: Designed with the user in mind you will now find contextual ABC and DEF information served up in a secure format alongside all GHI information...

Bug-hugging is the phenomenon of programmers keeping bugs assigned to themselves without actually doing anything to fix them. You typically engage in bug-hugging when there is a bug that you feel strongly should be fixed, but which you also simply haven't gotten around to working on yet. Meanwhile the...

I learned this term from a chart presented at a team meeting. It contained a column labelled BIS . When asked what those letters meant, the team manager explained that it's an abbreviation for butts in seats . Everybody in the room instantly understood. It is the number of actual human beings sitting...

The letters SQM originally stood for Service Quality Monitoring, but that doesn't really answer the question, "What is SQM?" SQM is the internal code name for the technologies behind what is publically known as the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program . This is a voluntary program...

It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues. Names and file system filters . Even if you aren't interested in file system filters (and you probably aren't), the discussion of names is very interesting, particularly in light of the confusion over hard links and the...

Why have a conversation when you can dialogue ? I think this is minimal work, but do others care? If they don't, then this is one for the ideas that failed bin. If they do, well let's dialogue... No need to talk when you can dialogue .

It has been famously said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same holds true for Microspeak . In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about extensibility : Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future...

You may hear an old-timer developer use the verb zap . That proposed fix will work. Until everybody gets the fix, they can just zap the assert. The verb to zap means to replace a breakpoint instruction with an appropriate number of NOP instructions (effectively ignoring it). The name comes...