Communications Disconnects

“Why doesn’t my manager listen when I explain the details?”
“Why doesn’t the developer just give me what I ask for?”

If you’ve ever heard these complaints—or made them–you’re not alone. Questions like these are a symptom of a communication [...]

Context Switching - Congruent Action

Managers get a bad rap when conversation turns to context switching. Johanna Rothman indicates they may have forgotten what development is like. Tom DeMarco in Why Does Software Cost So Much (If We Did Only One Thing to Improve …) states “I’ve come to believe that fragmentation is due mostly to managerial sloppiness.” (pg 90).

How [...]

Context Switching - The "hardware view"

I met George Dinwiddie so long ago, CompuServe ruled the online world. We participated in the Software Development Forum. He recently added to the context switching [...]

Context Switching for Fun and Profit

I usually have 3 or more things going on at any time. Right now I’m doing exploratory work for one client (lots of try this, try that, well, how about trying something else?), upgrading a system for another client (I’ve already done three of their systems), and preparing for a [...]

Context is Everything

Today I had the opportunity to remember that “context is everything”. Hurricane Frances continues her slow crawl up the eastern United States. It started raining here in North Carolina yesterday (Tuesday 2004.09.07). This morning my radio crackled with reports of accidents and emergencies. Fortunately, none were in our response area. Then the [...]