Concrete terms can also be specific or general. For example,

General terms and specific terms are not opposites, as abstract and concrete terms are; instead, they are the different ends of a range of terms. General terms refer to groups; specific terms refer to individuals—but there's room in between. Let's look at an example.

Furniture is a general term; it includes within it many different items. If I ask you to form an image of furniture, it won't be easy to do. Do you see a department store display room? a dining room? an office? Even if you can produce a distinct image in your mind, how likely is it that another reader will form a very similar image? Furniture is a concrete term (it refers to something we can see and feel), but its meaning is still hard to pin down, because the group is so large. Do you have positive or negative feelings toward furniture? Again, it's hard to develop much of a response, because the group represented by this general term is just too large.

We can make the group smaller with the less general term, chair. This is still pretty general (that is, it still refers to a group rather than an individual), but it's easier to picture a chair than it is to picture furniture.  read more »

To discuss the use of dialog-based decisions across stakeholders, and trade studies, in order to achieve strategic and tactical decision-making without bringing development to it's knees.

About how to elaborate requirements

People that are on a development project often use language whose meaning is ambiguous. Unravelling this lack of clarity be a tricky thing to do. Development relies upon effective communications, and achieving this foundational capability requires that all parties consistently understand the meaning behind the words that they are using. Such understanding usually requires careful listening, disciplined synthesis of concepts, and clear and written elaboration and allocation of derived details. Each of these steps involves conscientious and persistent attention in order to be successful.

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This is how I spent over half my weekends and evenings from early April until early October, 2007, trying to get Vista to work as advertised. I had decided to upgrade to Vista in late February, shortly after it was formally released after a long and difficult series of public betas.  read more »

I've been working for the past few weeks on several features of this web site that I felt were important:

• The capability to aggregate RSS data from partner blogs and provide it on various views
• The capability to provide visibility of content which is still under development when desired
• The capability to subscribe to content and get email notification when it has changed

Such statements can form the start of functional requirements, but for me on this site, as in so many other situations, it's often first more fruitful to explore what's possible through prototyping and experimentation, before spending too much time trying to get the lower-level requirements right. This is particularly the case when the technologies you choose to use are unfamilar, evolving, or immature. In the case of the above capabilities, some required support from other open-source authors, some required changes on my web site host, and some were able to be done locally.   read more »

Microsoft has lost a ridiculous amount of money as a result of my having these problems, even after missing their launch date repeatedly. They have great vectors for supporting their many users, but had I been paying $65 for each of the phone calls (or even incidents) I made to Microsoft, I would have thrown up my hands a long time ago and migrated to Ubuntu (Linux distribution).  read more »

In medicine, the term chronic disease is used to describe disease conditions which are long-lasting or recurrent, and indicates the course which a disease may take across a population. The term is used to distinguish such patterns and the required treatments from an acute disease, which has shorter treatment times, and typically more predictable treatments. Both chronic and acute diseases can have a range of severities.

There is a well-accepted body of knowledge that the repair time for problems increases the further away you get from the source of the problem. This is due to several different interacting situations:  read more »

A problem is a questionable property observed during some evaluation or operation of a system. It may be reclassified as an anomaly if it's determined to be a nuisance, a failure if it’s determined that it affects operation of the system in an unacceptable manner, or a request for enhancement if desired functionality is in fact missing… but is always a distraction, if its root cause is difficult to isolate, if it cannot be duplicated, or if the problem is with the user, not the system. The problem may even become a feature if it turns out to be useful in some circumstances. Determining which of these paths is actually pursued is highly dependent upon how well the problem is written in the first place - and if you think that always is done well, read this.  read more »