Comments on: Current working pattern… http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2009/09/09/current-working-pattern/ Articles on random topics in Programming, Systems Administration, Academia and Industry by Mark Dennehy Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:39:43 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Mark Dennehy http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2009/09/09/current-working-pattern/comment-page-1/#comment-250 Mark Dennehy Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:06:46 +0000 http://stochasticgeometry.wordpress.com/?p=289#comment-250 That <i>is</i> the incremental build process! That's the downside of working on infrastructural networking stuff, a lot of the time, it's all-up testing or very close to it. That is the incremental build process!
That’s the downside of working on infrastructural networking stuff, a lot of the time, it’s all-up testing or very close to it.

]]> By: Conor http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2009/09/09/current-working-pattern/comment-page-1/#comment-249 Conor Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:43:12 +0000 http://stochasticgeometry.wordpress.com/?p=289#comment-249 Any reason you can't do a more incremental build process? Are you recompiling *all* of the project? Any reason you can’t do a more incremental build process? Are you recompiling *all* of the project?

]]> By: Scott Wimer http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2009/09/09/current-working-pattern/comment-page-1/#comment-248 Scott Wimer Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:31:47 +0000 http://stochasticgeometry.wordpress.com/?p=289#comment-248 It's even worse than that. Software development is primarily cognitive. When we work on software, what we spend most of our actual effort doing is essentially running the code on a CPU in our head. We're modeling its execution and thinking about how the portion we are working on will respond to different inputs and how it will interact with the rest of the system. It takes time to "load the program into memory." This is the real cost of slow development hardware. This is why multiple monitors have always had such a strong productivity improvement on all knowledge work. Plus, once the program has been flushed from our mental cache, it can be hard not to pursue some other distraction for a few minutes before diving back into the real work. If you need to find published stuff about this, look at Peopleware by Demarco and Lister, and Software Facts and Fallacies by Robert Glass. I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones I know about. Scott It’s even worse than that.

Software development is primarily cognitive. When we work on software, what we spend most of our actual effort doing is essentially running the code on a CPU in our head. We’re modeling its execution and thinking about how the portion we are working on will respond to different inputs and how it will interact with the rest of the system.

It takes time to “load the program into memory.” This is the real cost of slow development hardware. This is why multiple monitors have always had such a strong productivity improvement on all knowledge work.

Plus, once the program has been flushed from our mental cache, it can be hard not to pursue some other distraction for a few minutes before diving back into the real work.

If you need to find published stuff about this, look at Peopleware by Demarco and Lister, and Software Facts and Fallacies by Robert Glass. I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones I know about.

Scott

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