The Effect of the metaphor on development

Metaphor was the least understood of all 12 practices of XP. This lack of concrete definition has made us uncomfortable in the initial stage of the project. Some of members grumbled that why we should prepare metaphor on our project when the due for assignment of metaphor was coming. That was because I and other members spent already huge amount of time to understand the requirement from the paper and we finally became able to get relatively concrete concept of the “Probe” system. But If the paper had contained a kind of metaphor it’s system, then we could have understand easier and we don’t have to trouble of finding satellites related papers for two days to understand what the “experiment” implied.

Anyway we prepared metaphor for the probe system. We actually didn’t utilize the terms much in our metaphor during the project. However since I was not familiar with the probe system, I kept them in mind when I implemented the specific part which I frankly didn’t understand practically. Although there were not such things that without metaphor it was impossible or very hard to implement, it did help me to understand the probe system easily.

Whenever my pair would say, “How do you plan to order a command to attitude computer” or “How could I implement the command module.” The word “command” in the sentence sounded like the command from a team leader of “Expeditionary team.” And also when I said “command”, in some degree it meant the command of the metaphor. Probably my pair must understand that term in the same line with me
Metaphor has been like picture over drawn on the jigsaw puzzle that leaded us to put the puzzle together in additional to the hard clue of the shape of the puzzle.

In the end, if it were the project on the more complicated and unfamiliar system, we might have failed the project without metaphor which made the communication with other members effectively. It might be really as hard as we would put jigsaw puzzle together without picture on it.