Comments on: “More Haste, Less Speed.”

By: KevDog

KevDog — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:50:51 +0000

John Wooden, legendary basketball coach for UCLA, said it best, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

By: catschwamm

catschwamm — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:12:31 +0000

Unfortunately, while we are on a software team, we do not work for a software company: we work for a laboratory. Not everyone understands technical complexity and the way things should work, they just understand that if they give you a carte blanche budget and let you hire as many people as you want, the project should get done when they say it needs to be done. Regardless of how much we tried to reason with them/explain the situation (just because you hire someone doesn’t mean they can immediately jump into a project??), there were too many other pieces in the lab itself that were coming together at the same time and this piece is very necessary to make it all work. We have done everything we can within the team to get things moving at a reasonable, sustainable pace and we have successfully lobbied to get some deadlines pushed (while we were working on this Enormous Project we were expected to complete 9 more on the same date…we cut that down to 1, mostly due to the fact that we didn’t get the information we needed in time and/or things changed). However, “at the end of the day,” it’s still his company and we have to play by his rules.

By: Bill Sorensen

Bill Sorensen — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:48:53 +0000

Borrowing words from Uncle Bob Martin: when you feel pressure, slow down.

A deathmarch like this represents a serious management issue. The question isn’t “what can a developer do to mitigate the problem” but “what can management and the team do to avoid the problem.”

Reduce scope. Institute postmortems. Look at Lean and Agile methodologies. If the developers are the only ones adding value to the project, why should management be kept on?

By: G Valentino

G Valentino — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:22:39 +0000

There are a few things I do to get myself back to a normal state.

The first is to change the music. I know it sounds petty and makes me ever-so-precious, but I find what I listen to will impact how productive vs easily distracted I am. It also depends on what I’m working on: I recalled last week that when I’m writing a help file “Birth of the Cool” is all that. If I’m in the middle of writing a really long user story Burial provides the right amount of ambiance. When I’m testing/accepting, The White Album does the trick.

The second is the gym. Just today I was struggling with something and knew I had to get out of the office. I spent 30 minutes on the elliptical at a quick jog, listening to a sports podcast, and what I was working on became a little clearer. I wouldn’t say it solved everything, but I felt more focused about it when I got back to my desk.

I think what it really comes down to is taking myself just a little outside of the moment. It might be something trivial like brushing crumbs off my desk, looking up a nagging question in Wikipedia, or even just taking out a pencil and paper and writing down the essence of the actual problem that I’m working on. I can’t take too long, because then I’ll completely lose focus, but just re-kajiggering my context (or even doing a simple thing that gives me a sense of having done SOMETHING) helps. It’s like the old motivational poster says: Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal.