Hiking in the rain

My wife, a neighbor, and I went on a hike a few weeks back. What started out overcast and a little drizzly turned into a light rain and eventually a downpour. The path became muddy in many places, and the red rocks vistas hid behind midst and fog, adding to the poor visibility. The temperature was cool and the clouds trapped the earthy smells of our surroundings. You could smell the rain as we splashed and sloshed down the trail toward two popular destinations. (The Seven Sacred Pools and the Devil’s Kitchen if you’re interested in hiking these areas.)

On good weather days, these hikes are crowded, but today with the weather, it is just us and a handful of other soaked hikers. On the return hike, as we passed a group of hikers, one of them asked us, “How much further?”

Being lost in my thoughts and hypnotized by the rain tapping on my hat, I responded almost automatically, “Not much further. Less than a mile in that direction.”

She thanked us and started hiking again when my neighbor called to them, “Wait a minute. Where are you going?”

“The parking lot.”

My directions assumed she wanted to see the Devil’s Kitchen. We quickly gave her updated directions and they thanked us and went on their way.

It’s interesting how often we assume context. I assumed the wrong destination.

How often do we assume a context on our projects?

For example, a simple question such as, “How many books did we sell?” requires us to ask many context questions else we can easily assume the wrong context:

• How do you define a book?
• What time period is of interest?
• By “sell”, are you implying that we received payment or that we simply made a sale? That is, how do you define a sale?
• What region are you interested in seeing sales? Or is it globally?

And many other contextual questions...

It’s one of the reasons I started calling the conceptual the alignment phase in my data modeling classes. We align ourselves on the project’s language and context. It is so important to align as early as possible on a project. Teams that jump quickly to solutions or improperly apply rapid application development approaches such as Agile?are most susceptible to context surprises, often sending users to the wrong destinations.?

To quote William Kent from his classic, Data and Reality, So, once again, if we are going to have a database about books, before we can know what one representative stands for, we had better have a consensus among all users as to what "one book" is.