Logging Your Work - Best Practices in Learning From Mistakes and Reproducing Success

There are a broad range of reasons for logging or tacking the work we do.  In technology work, we have such a varied bunch of tasks we perform that this becomes a crucial habit for avoiding re-inventing the wheel.  At a high level, logging your work is a good habit.  Thus, let's look at the ways this can be a benefit that more than pays for the time spent. Trial and Error There are times that we fall into the trial-and-error approach to solving problems.  We know that this is not the best practice.  However, sometimes the brute force approach is the only one we can think of.  These times are the ones where logging your work is critical to a successful solution.  Yes, we might find a solution but if we do not have a trail of what we changed to get there then we will be hard-pressed to repeat the solution the next time we see the problem. Take Advantage of Tools This practice can be very time-consuming.  You can easily add ten percent or more to the time spent on a task by creating a log or story to track your progress.  The good news is that there are a lot of tools that provide this feature to some level.  It may be something as moderately useful as code commit logs.  On the other hand,  sometimes you can see change history and track your every command.  For example, Linux and UNIX users can look at the shell history file.  This provides a step-by-step log of what they did on the system.  This can be useful for tracking down what hackers have done but it is better used as a way to ensure you can reproduce the steps it took to get that tricky problem solved.    

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