[development] What about reviewing patches?

[Chris Johnson]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Kathleen Murtagh <kathleen at ceardach.com> wrote:


> In terms of time management, I've been thinking a lot about this issue
> :)  It comes down to patterns, motivation and task switching.

Exactly.  And tooling.  The world of software development has been
standardizing and optimizing the email client for more years and far
more man-years than the "test patch files against CVS" environment.


> Then is task switching.  I know this one well :)  Although the actual

> 6 totally wasted hours due to overhead.  I am, obviously, an extreme
> example of this phenomena.  However, a "20 minute" patch review can

> Kathleen Murtagh

No, you're not an extreme case.  You're just far more observant and
informed about the issue than most.  In their classic book Peopleware
, Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister report on studies of programmers'
productivity relative to the characteristics of their work
environment.

"It is clear that interruptions are a major cause of low productivity
among programmers. Why? The problem is not the time needed to handle
the interruptions themselves, but the time needed to get back into the
programming problem. Everybody, no matter what they do, face a
reorientation time when they return to their work after an
interruption. When you are reading a magazine article and look up to
answer a question, it takes you longer to read the next paragraph than
if you had been reading continuously."
  -- from this article:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/it-nielsen4/?dwzone=ibm