I have seen meticulous, beautiful lab notebooks before. Paper ones. With numbered oversize greenish pages, faintly quadrille ruled, filled with exceptional INK penmanship, paragraph after paragraph of cogent technical observations, theoretical musings, responses to papers, thought-experiments and real experiments, taped graphs and images. Everything dated and signed. I've seen stacks of them spanning YEARS of work.
I tried. Mine look like shit. If it's in ink, it's peppered ALL OVER with correction after correction after correction. Perhaps it's a matter of practice, but then I've not been at one place long enough where projects weren't constantly re-shuffled, killed, or lasted long enough to get a grip (sometimes the job and the company itself doesn't even last long enough).
Perhaps these are becoming a relic of a lost era? Paper is too much of an "air-gap" when everything is done on computer. Moreover, the standard 2-week Agile "sprint" leaves no time for careful thinking and writing. One can't put epiphanies gained from writing up notes into "the deliverable" for a freaking Jira Ticket.
>Perhaps these are becoming a relic of a lost era? Paper is too much of an "air-gap" when everything is done on computer. Moreover, the standard 2-week Agile "sprint" leaves no time for careful thinking and writing. One can't put epiphanies gained from writing up notes into "the deliverable" for a freaking Jira Ticket
So, I get what you're getting at here (I think), especially as someone who came from research labs and then moved into computer science, but teams should be building doco into the tickets and pushing back on anything that doesn't have some meaningful documentation built in.
Easier said than done in some organizations, I know, but I still think we need to be the ones to push back.
FWIW, some do structure a "data review" state prior to closure of a ticket where the deliverable is some type of report (often with a presentation). Obviously, this can't be done for every ticket but it's appropriate for periodic "capstone" tickets.
I tried. Mine look like shit. If it's in ink, it's peppered ALL OVER with correction after correction after correction. Perhaps it's a matter of practice, but then I've not been at one place long enough where projects weren't constantly re-shuffled, killed, or lasted long enough to get a grip (sometimes the job and the company itself doesn't even last long enough).
Perhaps these are becoming a relic of a lost era? Paper is too much of an "air-gap" when everything is done on computer. Moreover, the standard 2-week Agile "sprint" leaves no time for careful thinking and writing. One can't put epiphanies gained from writing up notes into "the deliverable" for a freaking Jira Ticket.