Worth 80 programmers
As soon as you tell management that the changes they want will delay the release date, their first question (in most companies at least) is how many extra people you want. Brooks's Law, that adding manpower to a late project makes it later, is not well understood outside the programming field.
Steve McConnell has a great anecdote about a late project where they took all 80 developers off the project and replaced them with one highly competent guy, who finished on time. The point is not that you should do this, but that the story is believable.
A good rule if you're in a large organization and someone offers you a horde of developers to improve productivity is to take them, find out which of them are any good, and assign the rest to tasks that don't touch production code (e.g., test case automation). A good programmer is at least 10 times as productive as a mediocre one, so keep the quality of your actual production team as high as you possibly can.
Filed under "thoughts that make me happy not to work for a bank any more..."
Steve McConnell has a great anecdote about a late project where they took all 80 developers off the project and replaced them with one highly competent guy, who finished on time. The point is not that you should do this, but that the story is believable.
A good rule if you're in a large organization and someone offers you a horde of developers to improve productivity is to take them, find out which of them are any good, and assign the rest to tasks that don't touch production code (e.g., test case automation). A good programmer is at least 10 times as productive as a mediocre one, so keep the quality of your actual production team as high as you possibly can.
Filed under "thoughts that make me happy not to work for a bank any more..."
Labels: management
posted by Pete Bevin at
8:00 AM
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