Multitasking considered harmful

Over the weekend I came across an article published in German online news magazine Spiegel Online. The article (English) explains that humans can't do multitasking and when they do, mistakes creep in - some of them might be deadly.

Further the article mentions a study performed by Basex called The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity.

I like that the topic is getting broader attention. It's something I've always suspected, albeit a lot of people around me try to convince me that working on several things at once actually works. Software developers need to be left alone and are not to be interrupted. It's not "being customer focused" when a developer switches away from coding to answer some questions. The developer's job is to create a working solution and needs to concentrate. He needs to stay focused, be disciplined and analyze the problem to be solved well. It doesn't make sense to try everything at the same time.

One of the most valuable tools besides a good IDE is an issue tracker. If you don't use at least something like Bugzilla you are bound to end up in chaos, overworked and will soon feel burned-out. A more sophisticated solution than Bugzilla are tools that help you and your team to manage the whole project by integrating everyone whether it be stake holders, developers, managers or testers. That's why we develop Savila.

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