This blog post from Stack Overflow says devs are lucky if they get one 2-hour session of focus time each day. Better yet, mute channels during working hours that only need to be checked periodically.ĭevs need several hours of focused, productive time. In addition to tools that you can use to reduce context switching during the code review process, have them try the following interventions:ĭoes every Slack/MS Teams notification need your immediate attention? Probably not. Thankfully, your team can use tools to help them focus on a single task at a time and increase their productivity. There's also an element of personal responsibility for developers to manage their own context switching. Get automated notifications when high-risk work like PRs merged without review happen. You know how to stay focused, reduce distractions, eliminate meetings, and guide your teams in code review best practices, right? Well, maybe most days.īut as more teams operate asynchronously, it can be harder for team leads or engineering managers to pinpoint where context switching might be impacting productivity.ĭo you know your team's average pull request review time and how that impacts total cycle time and sprint planning accuracy? Better still, are you notified when a branch is merged without review or only a LGTM comment?Ĭonnect your Git, project, release, and incident management tools to LinearB to see how your team's review time stacks up to engineering metrics standards. How to Reduce Context Switchingīy now you're an expert at increasing productivity. So can you eliminate context switching for your team? No. When a problem occurs on code I wrote days ago, it’s more difficult to debug. I end up having to re-read the whole thing before I can start coding again.Īnd this context switching hurts the code quality. If I need to answer questions or make changes four days later, it’s hard to get back into the flow state I was in. This harms the review quality and specific tasks worked on alongside it.įor the developer issuing the 4-day old pull request, can you imagine what happens to their short-term memory with that much extraneous cognitive load? After a while, they'll just shrug and comment “LGTM." What ends up happening is that your team spends a big chunk of their review time context switching. And then, they will switch between tools to communicate the review, especially if your team members are operating asynchronously.Ī typical code review requires the developer to switch context endless times and none of the tools were designed for the review process. Let's look back at the study mentioned previously.įor the PR reviewer, they often have to switch between a series of environments to help understand the code and its scope. And that leads to a lack of enjoyment, a lack of engagement, and a lack of productivity.Ī typical code review requires the developer to switch context endless times and none of the tools were designed for the review process. Who hasn't finally gotten into a flow state only to realize you're five minutes late for a meeting? You attend the meeting, begrudgingly, and then spend another 30 minutes after the meeting trying to get back into your flow state. Without focus, it is impossible to enter a flow state.īut we can't just avoid context switches altogether. The essential problem with context switching is that it ruins focus. Without focus, it is impossible to enter a flow state. Managing and improving context switches, especially around pull requests, can do more to increase your team's productivity than almost anything else. The bigger the difference between the first task you are working on and the next task you switch to, the larger the context switch between the two tasks is. Context switching is the process of shifting between multiple tasks unrelated to each other. Understand How to Counter Context Switching.Why Is Context Switching Time Consuming?. And it turns out that idle time and context switching, particularly in the pull request process, are developer productivity killers. We create a pull request and then move on to the next thing.īut the cognitive load needed to revisit code increases with each hour that passes after we create a new pull request. That's a lot of idle time.īut it’s not like you’re waiting around for someone else to review your work. Studies indicate developers wait on average 4 days for a pull request review.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |