Thursday 21 December 2006

Project Management - The Developer's Productivity Guide

Not much of my time is really spent on pairing with the developer for production development but I do spend some time howering around them for Business clarifications and other petty things.. For the last few days when I was really trying to understand the areas where the developers loose most of their time and the reasons for the Iterations not being enough to finish the features that they are working on, while I was trying to find all these things I really came across a strange thing...A Lot of foreplay and playoff happens when they are on the RAD tools doing the production development...

While me and Kari (My Boss) discussed about effectively using the RAD tools for development specially when we saw the way Savio (Our Tech Lead) organises them, it was something that we wanted our guys to really work on, however I see something more major here in terms of the productivity... ofcourse organising the development window is going to help but what about other things ? Imagine you have to continously refer to a Wiki page or to the Bug Tracking tool ? Or the Web Server Logs ? or the constantly buzzing PM who wants update from you on the IM window? Or your Sweet Heart who is the inspiration to you when you develop something ... or to that matter your Online date you were just hitting on in Orkut?

Yeah so the reason I say all this is that I see lot of toggles of windows when you are working be it any of the above or something not here... I would say in a whole 8 hr work period you would actually spend toggling windows and changing and switching and searching things for atleast 1 hr... You may for sure Disagree ... But on my Blog you are allowed to lol. So the conclusion is why dont we provide the developers with a 21 inch monitor .... or a more huge monitor so that the developer can really see lot of items in one go... (I am not in favour of changing the font size to the lowest to make this happen). So if you really have a huge monitor 21" or more it will for sure make a difference. On the other front the cost of the monitor is not so high (7000 INR + the 17" monitor we buy).

Though I agree that it wont increase the productivity drastically but the developer productivity will certainly be improved... what do you Industry experts say? While I prepare for the next Hurdle in the Developer Productivity?

regards
Sameer Shaikh