communication!

i've always been acutely aware of the fact that a lot of problems in life arise out of the lack of proper communication - and IT is no exception to this rule.

the oracle guys at place i work, are all (with one exception) non-developers, and have decided to start writing some web-services in order to expose some features that haven't been available before.

one of the services they wrote gets the purchase order for any given sales order. as i tried to consume the service today, i noticed that the purchase order had a flag for whether the purchase order had been canceled - but here's the thing: the flag was not a boolean, it was a string and it returned either 'Yes' or null.

so i called them and explained that it might be better to use a boolean. they seemed a little reluctant, so i went over to their desks to try to persuade them. and when i got there i realized that i could not explain what i wanted to explain without technical terms, and in a way that would make sense to them. i guess that happens when you only communicate with other techies on a regular basis, but that is really no excuse.

everything ended up ok; i had to explain a few concepts and terms like coupling, cohesion, etc. but in a way that meant something to them and would show them the values of their code.

communication is hard, especially when we can't speak the same language. i'm looking forward to more opportunities to interact with the oracle guys, so i can get out of my comfort zone and expand my vocabulary.