It's age and audience-specific, but it used to be you could make references to popular TV shows. With the net anymore that's gotten tougher. Movies are still a good staple for metaphors. As are stip-mall Americana-type references.
For instance I had a project manager (I coach agile teams) that had obviously lost track of her project. She kept coming up with new ways of doing the work, and the team didn't respect her and wouldn't attend meetings.
I was trying to explain to my team what the atmosphere felt like. I finally said "She's like a little girl at Wal-Mart, outside on one of those quarter fire truck rides. She keeps spinning the wheel left and right, desperately going to put out the fire, but the wheel's not connected to anything. She's just frantically spinning away while everybody watches her and smiles" or something like that. It got the point across at a deeper level, I think.
When I teach coupling and cohesion I usually talk about people living in houses -- you want your stuff in your house, and you don't want all the structural members of all the houses connected together, etc
Leaky Abstractions? Gilligan's Island. No matter what the professor or Gilligan made with those coconuts, you just knew it wasn't as reliable as the real thing.
Hope that helps. Kind of hard to come up with stuff without context.
For instance I had a project manager (I coach agile teams) that had obviously lost track of her project. She kept coming up with new ways of doing the work, and the team didn't respect her and wouldn't attend meetings.
I was trying to explain to my team what the atmosphere felt like. I finally said "She's like a little girl at Wal-Mart, outside on one of those quarter fire truck rides. She keeps spinning the wheel left and right, desperately going to put out the fire, but the wheel's not connected to anything. She's just frantically spinning away while everybody watches her and smiles" or something like that. It got the point across at a deeper level, I think.
When I teach coupling and cohesion I usually talk about people living in houses -- you want your stuff in your house, and you don't want all the structural members of all the houses connected together, etc
Leaky Abstractions? Gilligan's Island. No matter what the professor or Gilligan made with those coconuts, you just knew it wasn't as reliable as the real thing.
Hope that helps. Kind of hard to come up with stuff without context.