Cost of 1 code change and myth of multi-tasking

At Sprintly, we have a lot of data on developer cycle time. We track how long it takes them to complete different types of tasks (Stories, Tests, Bugs), as well as different sizes of tasks (S, M, L, XL).

The sample size was 147,494 items that had been both accepted & scored. 

Patterns we seen at Sprintly

1.  Developers are remarkably average. Our ticket data shows that across all of our users, cycle times are very similar: 

75% of all tickets in our system are started and completed in about 175 hours.

1 ticket to close on ~ 175 hours or 21 work days or 1 elapsed work month!

2. Most of the variability occurs before a ticket has been started (Someday to Backlog). This is the stage when stakeholders are figuring out specs and prioritizing work. In the Kanban world, this is typically called reaction time (the amount of time from when the ticket is created to when it is prioritized). There’s a lot of time wasted at this stage:

3. it also appears that teams have a hard time transitioning from “done” to “tested and ready to be deployed” (look at Completed to Accepted above).

Context switching introduces huge costs

For example, we have a Lead Developer who does a lot of code reviews, pairing, going to meetings, and fighting fires.

Here’s a graph that shows cycle times for developers on our team:

In this case, it’s the nature of the Lead Developer’s role that affects the amount of time it takes him to complete tasks.

The problem arises when you, as a manager, switch your developers to new tasks mid-stream. If your priorities are always shifting, you’re introducing huge costs to your team.

Thanks for this article, we need more metrics like this...
https://sprint.ly/blog/your-developers-arent-slow/

How to embed PDFs in Webpage 2014 - Word Online Document Viewer

A super feature of OneDrive is it has the ability to quickly view entire documents in your webpage without leaving your browser. That's right the you can embed entire Office documents including PDFs to be view in your webpage, without downloading the document. Office guys really nailed this functionality down!

Here's how:

1. Uploaded your desired document to Microsoft's OneDrive

2. Click on interested document to open in detailed view. PDFs will open in the Word Online detail view.

3. Click on File

sample is a PDF file

4. This will bring you to a File Menu and click Share and then Embed

5. Choose embed size and click on chevron (down arrow) to reveal start on page and additional options.

6. Grab Embed Code and paste into your webpage.

7. Sample embedded code demo

However, I did notice that it's not obvious in the above control that you can scroll through pages of the embedded document. You can right-click the doc for zoom factors, but not ability to scroll to a specific page, a slight oversight.

8. Add the following caption

TIP! Scroll Pages by mouse wheel, page up/down or up/down arrow, remember to click on doc first.

Here's the code for the tip.

Gmail Sweepstakes Lottery Spam - Obvious scam, but here for the record

Another obvious Sweepstakes Lottery Scam, but I documented here for the record as I found only one other hit for this message.

Do not download and open this document nhfp.docx from your hard drive, because it contains malicious virus.  Again, best practice is upload  to  Microsoft OneDrive  or   Google Drive.  I would recommend doing that with any questionable document such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDFs etc.

This is the text for search engines:

Congratulations this is to certify that your Gmail address have won you $500.000.00
USD and an Apple laptop for this 2014 annual sweepstakes lottery, that were 
organized by GMAIL & MICROSOFT OUTLOOK LOTTERY INC, & WINDOWS 
8.MICROSOFT WINDOWS collects all the Gmail addresses of people that are active 
online; among the people who subscribed to Gmail and Outlook. Gmail, we only 
select five people every year as our winners through an electronic balloting system 
without the winner applying. We congratulate you for being one of the people 
selected.

NOTE: CONTACT THE EMAIL GIVEN BELOW WITH YOUR INFORMATION.
Contact Email: gmalpt@outlook.com

1. FULL NAME: 
2. HOUSE ADDRESS:
3. OCCUPATION: 
4. SEX: 
5. AGE:
6. DIRECT PHONE NO:  
7. STATE:  
8. COUNTRY:

Thank you and accept my hearty congratulations once again!