Who taught: Andrew

Yesterday, my friend, Andrew, came to Carnegie Mellon University to give a talk about “Agile Software Development with Scrum.” I know it might sound all greek to some of you but simply speaking it is a computer science thing.

I was there too. In my opinion, it was a very informative and useful talk. I am sure that students felt the same way.

It was also useful for me in another sense. I learned another expression from Andrew. During his talk, he said this, “Has Agile jumped the shark?” At first, I thought “jump the shark” could mean a good thing. Something like it is so great that even a shark decides to jump out of the water. Well… as Andrew continues his talk, I could feel that the expression does not have positive connotations.

However, I was not get the exact feeling of the expression.

So, I looked it up. Then I realized that the shark is not the one who jumps. It is a person or a thing jumps the shark just like you can see from the youtube video that I included here. The expression is originated from this TV show, Happy Days, that aired from 1974 to 1984.

To be able to feel this expression fully, you should imagine yourself watching a man who is really going to jump a shark. As he is getting closer and closer to the shark, you would feel more and more excited but, once jumping is done, all of the excitement is gone.

Another way you can think of is that you are riding a roller coaster. As it climbs up and up, you feel excitement but once it reaches the bottom the excitement is not there anymore.

“Jump the shark” means a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity. (source: urban dictionary)

Now, I am not sure how many of the students yesterday evening understood the expression because most of them were non-native English speakers. Maybe I should ask them later and teach this expression while I am teaching my regular computer science stuff.