Last night we had to work towards a deadline. Thankfully this doesn’t happen too often, but we ended up sitting with 4 people in the office working away. Most of the work had to go through one of our user interface developers. The later it became I saw the poor guy running around between a programmer, an account manager and myself – plastering him with amendments :/
Every time he sat down back on his desk someone else called him to note something. It went on forever.
It was a typical example; you forget about all the great tools you use during the day in the heat of the night.
“Let’s skip the bug tracker so we are faster” = wrong
Reporting the bug usually takes less time then fixing it. So sitting next to each other waiting for one to complete and then brief the next change takes two peoples full time.
In addition for every task we usually need to understand, prepare and perform something. Theoretically this would mean, that if we have to do all these steps anyway, it doesn’t really matter in what order. The result would be the same.
In reality jumping between tasks that are not related to each other consumes more time. We need to understand the bigger picture for each task, prepare a completely different environment, open different resources etc.
Figure 1: Time to understand and prepare a task take less time when working on consecutive tasks
At some point we started putting all amendments back into our bug tracking system as we are used to. This enabled him to to pick amendment after amendment and saved his sanity and some time.
