More Pascal

“If we look at our work immediately after completing it, we are still too involved; if too long afterwards, we cannot pick up the thread again.”

A big challenge for managing a software development team is the problem of context switching. Interruptions in general are productivity-killers, and it’s especially true of a discipline that requires sustained focus like coding.

But in addition to small-scale interruptions (of the 5-15 minute variety), large-scale switching of priorities can also have a disastrous effect on productivity. I’m thinking here of diversions of the 1 day to 1 week variety. Frederick Brooks couldn’t have been more right:

“How does a large software project get to be one year late? One day at a time!”

(You have read The Mythical Man-Month, right? If not, get thee to a library immediately. It’s required reading for anyone in the software profession).

I do my best to take the above warnings to heart, but it can be tough in the day-to-day realities of production bugs and last-minute requests. One way I try to mitigate is to serve as the buffer between my team and these sorts of interruptions. No doubt there’s a huge cost to my productivity, but I can plan for that when I recognize it as a critical part of my role.

Pascal’s observation has a second application to software development, one held in tension with the “no interruptions” philosophy: sometimes a developer needs to take a break from her current tasking to get refreshed and refocused. This can play itself out in a number of ways, whether it be jumping from front-end to back-end development for a few weeks to avoid getting pigeon-holed, to taking a half-day to go through a tutorial on a new technology, to simply grabbing coffee for 30 minutes and getting out of the cubical. Project planners would do well to build in significant amount of “productive diversions” into their roadmaps, and front-line managers should not get grumpy when they don’t see developers at their keyboards 9 hours straight.

Ultimately my philosophy is simple: trust your team to be professionals, and let the results be your guide.