Ticket #3927: Carousel is broken.
The user experience is broken.
I can’t test that feature—staging is broken.
I’ve heard it in meetings, seen it on JIRA tickets, and certainly been guilty of saying it myself. Programs, processes, organizations, and industries—particularly those deemed ripe for “disruption”—are particularly likely targets. It’s an easy way to say that something doesn’t work as expected in some capacity: the carousel won’t let you go back to the title slide, the dropdown in the footer doesn’t, you know, drop down, the application 500s on the homepage in the staging environment.
The problem with things that are easy to say is that they’re also not specific and, by extension, not actionable. Fixing something “broken” is the poster child for “easier said than done.”
I’ve heard “broken” meant to describe all of the above examples. It can refer to an element that’s not perfectly centered on a page, an annoying expense reimbursement process, or a web page that literally serves no content. And while it’s naturally necessary for us to gloss over details in abstract, general, or high-level discussions, it’s precisely the day-to-day concrete conversations involved in writing software that suffer from this the most. It’s one thing to say that the airline industry is broken; it’s quite another to say that a particular feature of a specific program is broken. “Broken” is a proxy, a catch-all, for “doesn’t do what I want.” I don’t think we’d have much tolerance for colleagues who tell us the Fancy New Feature™ or Very Important Service™ “doesn’t do what I want,” and I think we should have a similar intolerance for “broken.” In fact, starting today, I’m going to stop using it.
From now on, if I have to communicate that something doesn’t work well or as intended, I’m automatically going to go the extra step and say, specifically, what about it doesn’t work well, correctly, completely, &c. If you tell someone something is broken and you expect them to do something about it, the natural follow-up is: “what do you mean? What, exactly, is broken?” One of my goals for this year is to streamline that communication. I’m throwing “broken” out of my vocabulary, and I encourage you to give it a try as well.