An acronym occurs when the first letters of a phrase are combined into a shortened form that becomes an abbreviated way of describing the original. In science, they are often used to take a fairly verbose and complex concept, such as Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and create a more concise and catchy noun LASER. The computing world is full of acronyms: Joint Photographic Experts Group becoming JPEG, or Graphics Interchange Format shortening to GIF. In these cases someone has done something difficult and complex such as invent a laser or an algorithm for compressing pictures for data transmission, and they earn the right to have a colloquial acronym named after their solution. What worries me is the vast number of acronyms that plague our profession that seemingly serve no real purpose.
Bandwagon by Association, or BBA
Most people in, or even outside, computing, know what a GUI is. It's a Graphical User Interface, first coined as part of the legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC - good acronym, smart people), and the subject of the excellent book Dealers of Lightning that should be mandatory reading for anyone working in software. Recently, I was at a presentation where someone was showing a fairly simple browser application that they kept calling WUI (pronounced WOOEY). I learned that this was a compact way of describing their "Web User Interface." After the WUI presentation had finished, a colleague and I tried to engage the room with a vision of how we wanted to build an Eclipse Rich Client application that offered basically the same set of scenarios that the WUI supported. Before the meeting was over it had been decided that we were building an EUI. At a future meeting, my colleague is thinking of presenting his vision for his new and wonderful "Pointing User Interface" (PUI), pronounced POOEY.
BBA is taking a perfectly good and well-recognized acronym and putting a new twist onto it to try to hijack the good kudos of the original.
Confuse, Obscure, and Baffle, or COB
A huge number of acronyms in software belong to this category. The idea is when chatting to someone, possibly a prospective customer, and slip into the conversation, "The problem is that your application isn't ZOP enabled, so you need to employ a WOF methodology to ensure your HIT technology gets tested to conform to JOP." Whether any of the acronyms have any meaning or not isn't really important. The idea is to give your audience the impression that you're talking about lasers and complex graphic compression algorithms so they'll think, "Geez, this guy is way ahead of me. I need to hire him as a consultant to stop me from looking stupid in front of my boss." It's a new twist on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the "Emperor's New Clothes," and almost all of the software acronyms in existence fall into this category. At the meeting where I was first introduced to the term WUI, it mattered not that most of the other million or so web developers worldwide and gazillion users of the Internet don't know or care what WUI meant; the people in the room had come up with the acronym and were very proud of it and enjoyed the elevated and fake sense of importance it gave them.
COB acronyms are there to make people feel part of a group who, by virtue of knowing a cliquey dialect, can exclude others from the group who don't know the secret code. It's a form of nerd camaraderie that adds no value and is more often than not a smokescreen for the fact there is no real content behind the concept being peddled in the first place.
What we need to do with software and technology is try to demystify it and to simplify our profession. We should be heading toward a more unified model of technology that is easier to understand, easier to implement, and easier for our users to apply and accept. This addictive obsession of the industry to jargonize concepts and ideas by puffing up their relevance and importance with stupid acronyms and buzzwords has to stop. In software we are here to solve problems, not create them. TTFN.