> I don't mean any offense to you or your terms but I think that the > major source of the confusion is not the the imprecision of the terms > because (as other have pointed out) all terms are imprecise. The major > problem is the *number* of these terms. Adding one or two more, even > with their benefits, would IMHO be counteproductive at this point.
Agreed. The reason I brought them up at all was that I think the other terms don't always distinguish between (to borrow Fabian Fagerholm's terms) organizational and technical categories (a "subproject" may equally mean a bunch of people and a bunch of bits). This is sometimes problematic. A particularly acute example: I'm in the middle of packaging a game called CSP. CSP stands for Combat Simulator Project -- is that a bunch of people or a bunch of bits? Project or product? To exacerbate the problem, the acronym CSP has other well-known meanings, too (Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes come to mind immediately), so to disambiguate, I have taken to calling this game CSPSim. Icing on the cake: sometimes even the construct "CSPSim project" appears in communication, upsetting my linguistic sensibilities on each such occasion. The moral is, I guess, not to seek new terms but to use the already existing ones carefully. Cheers, Istvan PS: I don't really have anything more to add to this thread, it already starts to feel a bit like "The Life of Brian", where the People's Front of Judea prepare to attain world supremacy within the next five years: "We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It's not going to shift one Roman soldier!" Just some free association on my part, no offense to anyone meant, of course.
