TILaaP: Buzzwords Kill

Someone mentioned SOA and I made the offhanded comment that I only had a vague notion of what that mean.  Evan told me that no one really knows what it means, but he dug up a definition for me:

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that supports service orientation. It is a way of thinking in terms of services, service-based development, and the outcomes of services.

Yes, that's much clearer.

In logic, they call that sort of thing begging the question.  SOA is a vague term used to convey an idea that no one really groks but that everyone seems to agree is good.  SOA, is a buzzword.

I'll take a moment here to differentiate between buzzwords and jargon, although they do overlap a bit.  Jargon is a lexicon that is specific to a group or a field.  It provides conversational shorthand for those in the group but obfuscates the meaning for those outside.  Buzzwords, on the other hand, are intentionally vague because they exist to sound good while hiding meaning from everyone.

Software development is a very precise art.  There's a good deal of abstraction, yes, but at some level you you have to actually tell things what to do, and buzzwords obstruct that.  They give people the false impression that necessary information has been conveyed.  I suppose I could re-frame this as "it's not enough to sound smart and trust your underlings to figure out what you mean".

And that's kind of the shame of it all.  Because Service-Oriented Architecture could turn out to be very worthwhile.  If only any of us knew what it meant.

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