A study now suggests that simply taking a break does not bring on inspiration — rather, creativity is fostered by tasks that allow the mind to wander.
“We’ve traditionally found that rapid-eye-movement sleep grants creative insight. That allowing the mind to wander does the same is absolutely fascinating. The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says Baird.
As well as revealing that breaks on their own do not encourage creative thinking, Baird’s work suggests an explanation for one of psychology’s great mysteries: why we zone out.
From an evolutionary perspective, mind-wandering seems totally counterproductive and has been viewed as dysfunctional because it compromises people’s performance in physical activities. However, Baird’s work shows that allowing the brain to enter this state when it is considering complex problems can have real benefits. Zoning out may have aided humans when survival depended on creative solutions.
Example user story (via Jeff Sutherland)
Lunch in Chennai - cheap, fast, and very, very good!
Long queues at passport control in the UK are easy to fix. Airports in the UK like Heathrow and Stansted are commercial ventures. Their operators should be required to fund an appropriate level of border policing in the same way football clubs pay for policing of matches. All the government should be required to do is set and monitor the minimum standards that the operators need to fund. Queues fixed and BAA, who are ultimately responsible for the national embarrassment that is Heathrow, would have no basis for complaint.
Here’s a quick ‘game’ to play with your software development colleagues!
- Spend a few minutes listing what makes a piece of software ‘high quality’.
- Next, work out ways there are of checking or measuring each of the quality attributes you have identified.
- Then decide how your team can change the way you work together to improve the quality of the software you produce.
- Finally, think about your existing quality assurance tasks and techniques. Are there any that actually don’t contribute very much to improving the quality attributes that you have identified? Challenge yourselves to justify the time and cost of continuing to do those.
Hints:
- think about what makes software genuinely useful, easy to use, and the code easy to understand.
- consider the question from the point of view of customers, end-users, project managers, developers, testers, and operations, etc.
- tools and techniques for checking and measuring quality include manual testing, automated testing, source code analysis, reviews, and inspections.
- Make improvements to the ways you work in small steps and expect a little ‘chaos’ (see Virginia Stir change model) before you see the desired improvements.
Holy cow…how google drive terms compare to dropbox and Microsoft. ..wow.
from @jmacdonald
Nice ideas but a step missing somewhere around 3 to 5: Work out how to feed, clothe, house, etc,. you and your family and pay those you are working with while doing steps 1 - 7 i.e. get funding.
I think this loses its way a bit after the first seven steps, but it’s still nicely done.
Wired asked me to write something for the last issue about start-ups, aka that ol’ heartache.
Here’s my attempt at a unified theory for starting up:
1. Find the people you believe you could build something amazing with. These are your cofounders.
2. Find something you love deeply that could be so much better. This is your market.
3. If you spent your lifetime on that thing, what could it become? This is your vision.
4. What is the smallest possible thing you could build that would test whether others agree? This is your minimal viable product.
5. Recruit the smallest team needed to build it. These are your seed investors and first hires. Be utterly ruthless about choosing people who share your values, vision and ambition level.
6. Build it and launch it. This is your first test.
7. Celebrate. It’s really important to do this. That was some intense stuff!
…
As well as volunteering her time at the Exeter Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Suman has started working with Splash Projects … she helped set up some of the events like this one in Singapore/Malaysia, locating and calling the charities, able to talk to them in Malay, etc.
… it’s not like Ant’s target dependency resolution stuff actually adds much value these days, if any at all, for a non-trivial build situation. Most of the build ends up being written procedurally.
Ant has become no more than a complicated XML wrapper around simple Java method calls!
I can write simple, concise Java code to make the same calls and I would have a compiler and all the usual IDE tooling to help.
Why do I want to program in a document markup language?
The real value in Ant is its Java libraries that provide a high-level build API, or services if you prefer to be all service-oriented about it.
On the other hand, Ant is still far easier to use than MS-Build.
I find it interesting to compare team composition, overall team size, and length of actual playing time compared to overall duration of a game for sports like Football, Soccer, Rugby, and Ice Hockey … and then compare that to cross-functional teams in agile software development approaches versus specialized teams in more traditional phased approaches to software development.
Football has specialized units (offense, defense, kicking), only some of which are on the field at any one time, and the game stops each time one of these swaps with another one currently on the field.
Soccer, rugby and ice hockey, in contrast, do not have specialist units in this way; the team on the field always contains all the roles needed to play the whole game and play does not stop nearly so often as it does in football.
The most obvious result of this is that soccer, rugby and ice hockey fit more actual playing time into a shorter period of time than football; primarily because there are less breaks in the flow of play for interruptions (in the form of TV commercials) to take place but also purely from the time needed to handover from one specialized unit to another.
While the total amount of time taken to play a game is not particularly important to fans of that sport, the total amount of time to complete a project is very significant for software development managers.
In addition, the proportion of a team’s players that are not on the field at any point in time is a significantly larger for football than it is for soccer and rugby. Again, overall team size may not be particularly significant for sport, but it is important for a cost-constrained software development effort.
Of course, there are other factors that could be debated. Possibly, specialist teams have the potential to produce higher quality outputs than their cross-functional counterparts. Football games are frequently higher scoring than soccer games, for example.
It is also interesting to note that in soccer, ice hockey and rugby, teams have different levels of specialization and flexibility within their team structures even though the overall team is cross-functional, and the replacement or substitution of a single player during a game can radically change the shape and the way a team plays, for better or for worse.
(For non-Americans, please, translate football above into American Football and soccer into football).
Yep, yep.
Google is mounting an increasing but thinly veiled offensive against every trend, platform, and service that doesn’t put it in the driver’s seat. People are searching less, which means they’re replacing Google with apps, social media, and other communities.
It’s one thing for Google to compete by introducing its own social network like Google+, even though it’s playing dirty by leveraging its massive search dominance and kicking Facebook and Twitter out of search results (which you can fix with the Focus on the User extension and bookmarklet backed by Facebook and Twitter).
But it’s another thing entirely for Brin to hop on the Hyperbolic Express like this.
Yep.
(Source: chartier)
A few days off in Cornwall, UK
Kenan (my youngest son and third from the left in photo) got a mention in the local rag after his recent fencing competition - shame they spelt his name wrong and got his age wrong (he turned nine in January but was still the youngest in the competition).
Rumour of cannibalism within Exmouth Town Veterans Football Team not true!
Designing great software is a constant battle with complexity, mercilessly simplifying away unnecessary complexity, and hiding necessary complexity behind simpler abstractions.
