Ok folks. This one is simple common sense. It’s kind of like not exposing yourself in public or not being vulgar around your parents. But it seems like I run into this situation at every company I’ve been at. Simply put: some jackass thinks it’s cool to name some super secret cool project with an ironic name (with possible sexual overtones) that may not be appropriate if a customer ever finds out.
Cool? Yes. Innocent? No. A bad idea? Yes. Why? Because it will likely make it’s way out into the real world and your customers will see it. It would be a rare case of it not actively hurting the company. Let give you an example and let me preface it by saying that names have been changed for my benefit alone. It’ll be obvious to the folks who were there.
I was working with group that had previously been a startup but were now apart of a large company after an aquistion. Most of the folks from the startup years still maintained their sense of humor and tried to make working for a big company interesting. So they were producing a security product and one of their current projects at the time was to implement a new authentication protocol. All concerns about implementing new methods of authentication aside, there was a lot of effort put into getting it right. This new authentication protocol had a long name but the acronym boiled down to d.r.u.g (again, names changed…).
When it came time to implement the daemon to manage the protocol interaction, they of course continued the theme and called the daemon d.r.u.g. dealer. (You can probably see where this is going). In testing, logs messages indicated that the d.r.u.g. dealer was providing to the addict (the client in the auth transaction). All through development and testing, the name inspired jokes and kept us laughing during one of the roughest release cycles we had seen.
Well, we shipped and moved on to the next release immediately. However, someone along the way neglected to change the name for our d.r.u.g. dealer. Not too long after, a customer called up to trouble shoot a problem with this new authentication protocol. When support asked for information from the logs, it was discovered that the d.r.u.g. dealer was still providing for the addict. The customer was more than a little shocked and support was extremely embarrassed by the situation. Needless to say management was unhappy and the engineering org got our asses chewed out.
‘Nough said?
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