What is Mind Mapping and why is it Essential for Software Developers?

What is Mind Mapping and why is it Essential for Software Developers?

What is Mind Mapping?

Mind Mapping is the act of visually organizing information. This could be your thoughts, goals, plans or anything. A mind map is the diagram used to organize the information in a heirarchical relationship among pieces of the whole. Basically a mind map looks like this

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Why is Mind Mapping essential to Developers?

Software Developers work and interact with a lot people ranging from Designers to Managers to testers and so on. A lot of times when coming up with a product, we have the picture in our head but when we start working on the product we may find out that there's something we've left out. Mind Mapping helps us to bring that picture in our head and convert it into a visual piece of information which lets us have more breathing space in our head to think about other things. Think of mind mapping as brainstorming your ideas but in a more visually pleasing and organized way.

When mind mapping, whether we're using a sheet of paper or on a mind mapping application, we connect major ideas to the central concept and branch out other ideas from those major ideas, so for example when writing down a brainstorm, we just write every idea down with in no heirarchical order, but using a mind map, we give each idea certain heirarchy, take the picture above as an example, if you're trying to create a website, the ultimate goal is the website itself but its branches would be Inspiration, Design and Development and under inspiration you'll create other branches of where you're going to get your inspirations from, and under design you put in the design needs and the development needs under development. This helps you stay organized through the process of the website creation because you already know what you need, where to get it and what you need to do.

You can also use this in other aspects of your life such as goal setting and planning and even studying. Mind Mapping is a powerful tool that can help you different aspects of life and help you better understand retain information.

You can more information about Mind Mapping and how to incorporate in your daily life here or you can make a Google search, there more hundreds of articles on mind mapping.

Thanks for reading.