Keith Ray posts this snippet of conversation: Ron Jeffries posted his email conversation with Jon Eaves on XP mailing list in “Bug tracking vs user stories” [ jon ] “Projects that have developers working on multiple simultaneous projects have a 30% higher defect rate than projects with developers assigned specifically to it” [ ron ]
Two recent posts (Focus, Focus, Focus and Breakthrough Thinking on Worker Productivity) talk about the effects of multitasking and interruptions. Spread a person across 4-5 tasks and interrupt her with phone calls, drop-ins, emails, beeps, and meetings and pretty soon no real work is accomplished. Some people – managers and technical staff – try to
Bouncing off the evils of multitasking, C. Keith Ray (who just started his own blog) has this to say about how pair programming can counter some workplace interruptions: Two effects pair programming has on tasking… in my experience… It keeps the people focused on a single task (less likely to be distracted by emails, web-surfing,
I found a reference to this article in my morning stroll through blogland: Multitasking makes you stupid, studies say. The article, by Sue Shellenbarger of the WSJ, points to evidence that multitasking doesn’t really save time. A growing body of scientific research shows that one of jugglers’ favorite time-saving techniques, multitasking, can actually make you