

How to complete your PhD (or any large project): Hard and soft deadlines, and the Martini Method - nreece
http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/2008/how-to-complete-your-phd-or-any-large-project-hard-and-soft-deadlines-and-the-martini-method/

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dreish
Applying the Martini Method to coding is not so simple: as has been pointed
out countless times, programmer productivity can't be measured in lines of
code produced.

But maybe something like

    
    
       svn diff | wc -l
    

is a good enough stand-in. Replacing a big section of repetitive code with
something smaller and more elegant would then count as productivity. Of
course, then it becomes an incentive to write dumb, repetitive code, check it
in, and then rewrite it the right way, but probably only for the programmer
with more alcoholism than self-respect.

~~~
nostrademons
I use a variant of the Martini Method where I try for at least 2 _substantive_
svn commits a day (not including minor bugfixes or cosmetic issues). I try to
do atomic commits, so this correlates very closely with function points. It
seems to work quite well; since the beginning of the year I've gone from r569
to r623. It's had a corresponding effect on observed product quality, having
gone from essentially a blank webpage to the full editor skeleton, a working
game, and several widgets for customizing it.

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at
Wrote a follow-up to this one (from a Computer Science perspective) at:
[http://amundblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-complete-
your-p...](http://amundblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-complete-your-
phd.html)

