Clif Notes: Personal Beast Best
As the holiday season approaches, many of us are looking forward to relaxing and spending time with family and friends. In addition to the traditions, celebrations, and festivities of the holidays, for many of us the end of year is a time of wrapping up and winding down. For many businesses things just naturally slow down as business slacks off due to holiday time off and vacations. Of course this obviously does not apply to those of you who are involved in retail sales!
I am one of those people who finds the end of year slowdown to be a particularly good opportunity to take the time to occasionally just sit quietly, idle back the normal busy brain activities, and become a bit more contemplative. One of the things that I have been thinking about recently is this issue of "Personal Best."
You normally hear the term used in a sports context such as running, cycling, weight training, or any number of other physical activities. As a matter of fact, like many other fad terms, it has become so ubiquitous, at times it gets a bit nauseating. The overuse and hype is rather unfortunate, because I think that the core concept is really worth thinking about. Let's start by considering a fairly typical definition of the term found in the Macmillan dictionary:
An achievement in a race, competition etc. that is better than anything that you have achieved before.
As I have already pointed out, you will notice that the definition is oriented toward sports and competitions. So for the purposes of this column, I would like to alter that definition slightly:
An achievement in
a race, competition etc. any personal endeavor that is better than anything that you have achieved before.
I can't help but wonder what would happen if we software developers approached our work with the same mindset as an individual engaged in, say, cross country running. (I'm going to have to use my imagination here since I, obviously, do not and never have done running of any kind.) You might set yourself up with several routes and keep records of your times, always looking to shave a few seconds off of your Personal Best time. It seems to me the trick would be to find a way to maintain the motivation to improve until such time as the improvement becomes the motivation itself.
What would happen if a developer started tracking how many lines of code they wrote and how many bugs were reported with 90 days per 1,000 lines of new code written? Then try to either improve on that by continuously reducing the number of bugs or increasing the number of lines of codes. Or both. It seems to me that kind of practice couldn't help but improve the quality of work being done. But would it eventually become a self-sustaining activity?
Given the fact that this idea is usually linked to some form of sports-like events, I think there would a temptation to set this up based on productivity measurements, such as lines of code written per day. Or number of hours worked without a break. But I'd like to see something related to software quality instead. Maybe something linked in with implementing the Clear Message Initiative (Jan-Feb 2011, p. 6)?
It might be an interesting experiment to try. If any of you routinely do something similar to this, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line at editor@intl-spectrum.com.
In the meantime, I hope you have a safe and joyful Holiday Season. I'll see you in January and we'll talk about our post-Holidays diet plans. (Just joking.)
