What are best practices when switching between projects/coming back to projects frequently?

Posted by dj444 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by dj444
Published on 2012-06-03T15:11:39Z Indexed on 2012/06/03 16:46 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 948

Filed under:

project-management

|

programming-practices

|

management

|

patterns-and-practices

The nature of my job is that I have to switch back and forth between projects every few weeks. I find that one of the biggest impediments to my productivity is the ramp-up time to getting all the relevant pieces of code "back in my head" again after not seeing it for a period. This happens to a smaller and larger extent for briefer breaks / longer breaks.

Obviously, good design, documentation, commenting, and physical structure all help with this (not to mention switching between projects as infrequently as possible). But I'm wondering if there are practices/tools that I may be missing out on. What are your specific practices for improving on this?

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about project-management

The Rules of the Project Management Game

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
How can you keep a project moving smoothly? Here are a guidelines for constructing rules to keep your projects moving forward. >>> More
A Project Management Office is More Powerful Than a Locomotive

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
Project success is often won or lost in the planning stages, that why having a project management office can be a boon to your success rate. Michelle LaBrosse will now extol the virtues of adding a PMO to your operation. >>> More
A Project Management Office is More Powerful Than a Locomotive

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
Project success is often won or lost in the planning stages, that why having a project management office can be a boon to your success rate. Michelle LaBrosse will now extol the virtues of adding a PMO to your operation. >>> More
A Project Management Office is More Powerful Than a Locomotive

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
Project success is often won or lost in the planning stages, that why having a project management office can be a boon to your success rate. Michelle LaBrosse will now extol the virtues of adding a PMO to your operation. >>> More
Recovering from Disaster Through Project Management

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
When disaster strikes, don't leave home without Project Management. Explore seven Project Management rules to help you when you find yourself looking for a magic wand to turn disaster into recovery. >>> More

Related posts about programming-practices

programming practices starting

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I have taken my major as computer science and Engineering and I am really confused at this moment. My first course was about learning C and C++ and I learned the basics of those. Now I am really confused what to do next. Some says I should practice algorithms and do contests in ACM-ICPC for now… >>> More
Are `break` and `continue` bad programming practices?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
My boss keeps mentioning nonchalantly that bad programmers use break and continue in loops. I use them all the time because they make sense; let me show you the inspiration: function verify(object) { if (object->value < 0) return false; if (object->value > object->max_value)… >>> More
Why is C++ backward compatibility important / necessary?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
As far as understand it is a well-established opinion within the C++ community that C is an obsolete language that was useful 20 years ago but cannot support many modern good programming practices, or even encourages bad practices; certain features that were typical of C++ (C with classes) during… >>> More
Any task-control algorithms programming practices?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I was just wondering if there's any field which concerns the task-control programming (or at least that's the way I call it). For a better explanation of task-control consider the following scenario: An application (master-thread) waits for a command - which might be a particular action or… >>> More
displaying python's autodoc to the user (python 3.3)

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I'm writing a simple command line math game, and I'm using python's autodoc for my math algorithms to help me remember, for example, what a proth number is while i'm writing the algorithm, but later on I'll want to tell that information to the user as well, so they'll know what the answer was. So… >>> More