Charrette

Me neither. I might say "design sprint" to refer to the same thing.

That make more sense. I work in the US since a while and never heard it here.

You guys have a lot of unused French words in your corpus. I guess that’s yet another.

It’s even a verb in French.

“No can’t hang out. I’m charrette until next week.”

“Yeah I’m somewhat charette lately, I would not take more tickets”

I've definitely heard it used, but only in the urban planning & public consultation context

Same, USian, never heard it in software. I only know the word because I attended a public charrette for proposed zoning changes in my city. My wife (she told me when I asked about the word) did design charrettes in graduate school, which in school are a kind of brutal peer critique of projects at the end of the term, rather than an interactive presentation and gathering of feedback from stakeholders as originally envisioned.

The public charrette I attended for zoning changes was pretty fascinating. The most interesting part was that about twenty roughly block-sized pieces of the city were chosen as case studies, and for each block, an entire wall was dedicated to visualizing the current state of each block along with implications of the proposed change and other options, and a there was a person at each wall available to walk you through it and answer questions. (A lot of the members of the public who attended were developers who were asking extremely specific and wonky hypotheticals, so this was not an easy job.) I had no idea what to expect, and I was flabbergasted at the effort and professionalism that went into it.

Wiktionary mentions the term as a USian usage.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/charret#English

I have heard it used exactly once before in Canada; seeing it here today was a “hug so they didn’t just make that up themselves” moment.

A quick entertaining story from that, that really highlighted the need to get all stakeholders involved at the design stage. The activity was designing the interior of a 10,000 sq ft startup incubator space. We were given the empty floor plan (inside a larger building), broke into groups, and each group independently did a floor plan. Lots of discussion about noisy/quiet areas, collaboration spaces/meeting rooms, small private spaces for phone calls, kitchen spaces and how to maximize the collision potential in the kitchens (people from different companies having conversations). It went really well and some great ideas came out of it.

And then one of the founders whose company would likely be inhabiting the space raised his hand. “I love all the variations we’ve all come up with, but I feel like no one is talking about the elephant in the room.” he says. Blank states all around. “We’ve all been focused on how to fill the empty area we’ve been given, but no one has said anything about the washroom on the floor plan we were given.”

The architects who were running the session bristled a little, while the rest of the room looked pretty confused. “What’s wrong with the washrooms? They’re placed close to the working area so that it’s a minimal interruption.”

“Ok, sure, but… I want you all to think about guys like me. I’m a 21 year old nerd with a barely funded company. We work long hours. We live our day-to-day lives on a super small budget. What do you think my diet is like? Do you really want the washroom that a guy who has eaten a $6 pizza every night for the last two weeks right next to the quiet desk you’re using every day?!”

Much laughter. Architects scribbling notes. And in the final built building, the washrooms are down a hallway, on the other side of a set of glass doors :D. Apparently it caused a huge hassle for the MEP contractors, since all of the plumbing had already been designed at that point, but I’m really not confident that that oversight would have been caught without that meeting.

In french, "je suis charrette" can be slang for "I am overloaded (with work)", in the same way as "I am on charrette" that the article mentions.

Chacun son expérience. C’est “définitivement”anecdotique.

Weird that you never heard it. Oh well. Why do I care.

Native french speaker as well, and I've never heard or used it in software development.

However, I have multiple friends in Architecture schools, like INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées), and it's widely used there