Hungarian Notation for Teams
Back in the day when I was writing windows programs there was this thing called hungarian notation. It was a form of shorthand that allowed you to add the type of a variable to the name of the variable. It led to variable names like “lpszUserName” that stood for “long pointer to a zero terminated string named UserName.” It made for some pretty awkward variable names, but the idea was that you could always tell the type of the variable, even if you couldn’t see the declaration. It was kind of handy, at least until somebody changed the variable type and forgot to change the name. In hindsight, it really was always doomed to fail for almost any kind of legacy code. Name the variable wrong and you introduce subtle bugs that will haunt you for years.
So there we are looking at a list of teams the other day. They had a lot of interesting things in common. They all have some specialization in a given domain. Often they had different geographic location. We were wondering if perhaps they should have some sort of naming convention applied to their names. That’s when I perked up and said, “Hungarian notation for teams!” If the team is located in Bellevue, then we will use ‘bv’. If the team is in the mobile domain, we’ll use ‘mb’. So for a team named “Viper” located in Bellevue doing mobile development we would have “bvmbViper!” Maybe you have a team that is located in San Francisco ‘sf’ that works on web apps ‘wa’ called “Cheetah” we would have “sfwaCheetah.” Now you can simply look at the name of your team and know instantly where they work, and what they work on.
Genius! Maybe we should do this for people too? I’m an Agile manager ‘am’ who writes a blog ‘bl’. You can call me “amblTomPerry”