Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 17, 2013

Requirements and Brown M&M’s Clauses

Filed under: Requirements — Patrick Durusau @ 2:10 pm

Use a No Brown M&M’s Clause by Jim Harris.

From the post:

There is a popular story about David Lee Roth exemplifying the insane demands of a power-mad celebrity by insisting that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band.

At least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room – a clear violation of the No Brown M&M’s Clause.

However, in his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande recounted the explanation that Roth provided in his memoir Crazy from the Heat. “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors – whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.”

Therefore, because there was so much equipment, requiring so much coordination to make their concerts function smoothly and safely, Van Halen’s contracts were massive. So, just as a little test to see if the contract had actually been read by the concert promoters, buried somewhere in the middle would be article 126: the infamous No Brown M&M’s Clause.

I would not use the same clause as IT consultants will simply scan for the M&M’s clause and delegate someone to do it.

But it would be a good idea for large requirement documents to insert some similar requirement for meetings, report binding, etc.

I don’t know where David Lee Roth got the idea but dictionary publishers do something similar.

List of words and their definitions cannot be copyrighted. For obvious reasons. We don’t want one dictionary to have a monopoly on the definition of one meter for example.

But, dictionary publishers make up words, definitions for those words and include those in their dictionaries. Being original works, they are subject to copyright.

How much you need in terms of requirements will vary.

What won’t vary is your need to know the consultants have at least read your requirements.

Use a Brown M&M’s clause, you won’t regret it.

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