Earned Value Measurement!

Earned value measurement, EVM!

I just learned about this in the past year. It is a magnificent concept. If only I had known about it decades ago.

Management Administration tools such as EVM are to daily activities as algebra is to arithmetic! One equation represents endless calculations.

I never realized the conceptual power of business administration.  And my father had an MBA. He taught business administration.  I wish that I had paid more attention to his work, instead of my fascination with technology and procedural excellence.

How do I know if I am "losing it?"

Over the past year I have finally narrowed down a description of what it means to know that I am losing my faculties.  Span of focus.

First of all, my mother suffered from a slow attach of dementia that started at about age 55 and grew steadily worse until she died at age 77.  The first symptom  for many years was loss of memory, especially memory of what is happening now.

Worried about the potential of the same affliction hitting me, I decided to shift my work activities into the world of IT when I was about 45.  The theory was that if I am working among many young folks at tasks that require attention to detail and good memory, then the people around me would alert me to the fact that I was losing it a long time before I became conscious of this.  I also recalled working for managers in the past that seemed to have totally "lost it" but a good subordinate, like me, covered for them sufficiently that they could maintain their reputation. I did not want to become one of those clueless managers!

Time went by. I passed 55, 57, and at age 60 I decided that OK, I think I may not be a victim of what ever it was that got my mother at age 55.

So now what do I do?

Since I have become fairly skillful, at least in my current context, of providing IT solutions for my employers, and it is a lot of fun, then why not keep going at the same activities?

I have continued to monitor my own consciousness and I have learned to gain some insight, so I believe, into the consciousness of the folks I work with.  What makes me different from them?  My current theory is that my span of mental focus, conscious awareness is greater, hence I can maintain context and see implications that I need to lead other folks through step by step.  Eventually I came to  see that my own mental field of vision can be limited by fatigue, boredom, or sickness (alcohol) and that even though I feel great and competent, I can tell by memory that my span of focus, span of attention is less that it has been at many times in the past.  Hence I am not as smart as I think I am.

The lesson, tentatively, is that span of focus, defines the progression of dementia in my own experience. My guess is that it is the same in others.  If my mind worked at the level of some of the people I know with who have similar experience and training in writing software I would consider myself to be demented.

The sad thing is they don't know. And I fear I won't know when it hits me!
"I see Iterators, but they don't know they are Iterators!"
(ref: "6th Sense" movie for those too young to get it.)

Is this post too harsh?  

Programming Productivity?

Many years ago, about 1995 or so, I started keeping a personal log of my time spent coding per the instructions of the famous Watts Humphrey's Personal Software Process. What I learned in the first year or so, especially as I move to new jobs was that the tools I used to do the tasks I was recording kept changing, and what was a lengthy  task in 1995 became a quick simple task in 1997.  The tools for the trade keep improving and productivity logs have limited usefulness.

So how do we manage to measure our own productivity as software developers?

This is not to say that such a log is useless. In 20 years it has saved me once from an attempt to blame me for something that I didn't do. Several times it has provided real data for how long a project takes if it is using the same tools in the same environment as previously recorded. But how often do repetitious jobs come up? Well that depends upon how long I decide to to hang around a job where I have already mastered the skills, and now I am in the process of teaching new folks how to do what I have done.  Probably a sign of stagnation, now that I write about it.