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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: Recording design decisions
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf
Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
Over on Shape, a recent thread has been discussing the use of keeping a journal, in particularly to record one's decisions and how long it takes to get feedback on one's decisions. In relation to my previous post but one, it's also an interesting question to ask about design-related questions.
I don't keep a journal, but I find myself using notebooks a lot nowadays, primarily to take notes of what clients tell me in meetings. And every so often I start keeping a logbook, and I keep doing it for a few months; usually moving to a different job (or out of a job) ends the cycle. I took it up again recently.
It doesn't involve much work, at the granularity I do it. A day's worth of entries could look like this (transcribed from a real entry that I selected almost at random from a "logbook" of mine) :
20/05/2003
* Stand-up (9h30->10h20)
* Document "Smoke Test" procedure (10h30->11h45)
==
* Discuss bugs (#237, etc) with QA Head (13h->14h)
* Help team implement ATs for #268 (14h->16h)
* Help team implement ATs for #275 (16h->17h30)
! #268
! defect in #275 caused by #135
MEMO: should our "estimate accuracy" metric reflect time spent fixing
defects introduced in tasks whose estimates are being tracked, e.g.
defect in #275 caused by #135, defect in #271 caused by #248 ?
Every time I do this, I find myself inventing notations - the "==" transcribes a twin horizontal bar that marks the time I take for lunch, and I can easily spot days when I did actually have lunch. Some days don't have the twin bar.
Logbooks are about activities rather than about decisions. But they could be of value to people interested in looking back at what they actually did - and asking whether what they did actually carried out their decisions.
I wonder how I might go about recording my decisions. It seems to me that I rarely take momentous decisions that would warrant an entry like "Today, after much thought, I decided to...". I can think of about two such in the past two years.
It feels more like work is a constant stream of micro-decisions. Small choices of how to respond to various events, against the background of an overall picture of what I want to do and where I want to go, which I try to clarify as much as I can. The choices translate into activities, so it feels like writing "I did this" is equivalent to "I decided to do this".
Nowadays work includes more training and consulting (and marketing) than coding and designing, although there may be opportunities to get my hands dirty again. If that does happen, I'd be on the lookout for design decisions and recording them - it would be an interesting experiment.
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