Article on ALM
products, but the first part is so true…
Worth a read
Multitasking is good
when it comes to computer programs, letting them do more with less. But when
computer programmers start multitasking, productivity flies out the door.
For one thing, when
programmers have to shift tasks, it takes "a really, really, really long
time," says Joel Spolsky, host of the Joel On Software Web site and
co-founder of Fog Creek Software. Programmers have to keep a lot of things in
their heads at once, Spolsky says, and the more they remember, the more
productive they are. "A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping
zillions of things in their head at once," he says, "everything from
names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility
functions that they call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they
store their source code."
On top of that, as
applications have become more collaborative, complex, modular, and distributed,
developers are having to track an increasing number of tasks and deal with more
interruptions from the people with whom they're collaborating. As a result,
they're multitasking more frequently and becoming less productive.
How bad is the
problem? Developers spend an average of 11 minutes on one task before being
interrupted to deal with another, according to Gloria Mark of the University of
California at Irvine's Department of Informatics, who has spent years examining
developers' work environments. It then takes them 25 minutes to return to the
original task.
Keeping programmers
productive in these fragmented work environments is a challenge for large
software developers as well as for IT shops developing for end users. In both
cases, application life-cycle management tools and processes can help. They
automate steps -- such as change management, build processes, and testing -- in
the development process, off-loading work from developers and cutting back on
the number of interruptions they face.
Rest
of Article --- http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/programmer-productivity/220100341
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