I've been re-reading the Mythical Man-Month and it occured to me both how wonderfully stated Brooks Law is and how awful Mills' team structure is. Has anyone actually had success with this sort of 10 person team with at most 3 coders?
Posted by Christian at August 1, 2003 09:41 AM |He talks about 500 person teams an such. With that size you usually have edge of chaos kind of behavior anyway. Also, the surgeon concept is overkill for an everyday 20 person company (the guy thinking about establishing it would be probably a wasted resource, same as the guy drawing the UML diagrams). Large teams that need this kind of thing usually exist in large companies. They operate in whatever way they operated for a while. Changing the way they operate usually causes a lot of damage and is not worth the scientific purpose. Of course IBM was able to afford these kind of experiments in the 60ies :-). Needless to say that no one is hiring 20 people and putting them all down on writing the same kind of code nowadays...
Posted by: at August 4, 2003 06:16 AM