In this week’s chapters of The Clean Coder, Robert Martin talks about the importance of meetings and when to determine that a meeting is worth your time. He also talks about the tools we can use to make accurate, sound, and effective estimations.
According to Martin, not all meetings require your time. If you find out that your time could be spent on something more productive, you can politely refuse the invitation. Even if your presence is demanding by someone of higher authority, you still have to determine whether that authority is more significant than your work schedule. Ultimately, your project is priority over many things and you have to manage your time well in order to complete that project accordingly. Martin also talks about “focus-manna” which programming requires a lot of. Essentially, focus-manna is your ability to concentrate and maintain your focus and unfortunately its limited. It is essential that you use your focus-manna appropriately and recharge by doing activities that doesn’t require much focus.
In chapter 10, we learned about estimations. There is a profound difference of how programmers and businesses understand estimations. Businesses sees them as a commitment and programmers view them as guesses. However in reality, it is difficult for an individual to understand the true nature of an estimation. There is an equation used by the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) to calculate estimations. This was done with trivariate analysis which is consisted of three numbers: Optimistic, Nominal, and pessimistic estimate.
Given these three estimates, we can describe the probability distribution as
follows:
• μ = O+ 4N + P
6
This scheme is designed to help prevent optimistic expectations.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.