Re: [tlug] [OT] Good IT Resume

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Darren Cook writes:

 > My opinion, FWIW, is that if you have that many people on the same
 > *codebase* it is time to split it into products/libraries, each with
 > their own small public API, and their own release cycles, and develop
 > each separately.

Your opinion, FWIW, is no different from that published by Fred Brooks
in 1975 or so.

Except that he noticed that (1) in the real world, release cycles are
interdependent, (2) maintainers and clients of the APIs tend to have
conflicting interests to some degree (as well as clients among
themselves), and (3) the quality level of the specification and
documentation of the "small public API" varies widely across products.

In view of these three facts, he proposed that larger scale
organizations are still needed.  Furthermore, they would need to have
rather different properties from the small teams---they cannot simply
follow "small team culture" with many members---and thus he came to
write "The Mythical Man-Month".

What Josh and I are saying is that XP and agile programming techniques
will increase the size of the job that a reasonably competent[1] team
of optimal size (5-10 members) can do, maybe even double it, but that
still leaves the megaprojects, like Amazon and the space shuttle
control programs that must be done by teams of teams.

It is my contention that agile programming has absolutely nothing to
contribute solving to the problems specific to team of teams
organization, except to increase the size of project where a team of
teams becomes necessary somewhat.  After that, no additional benefit.

Footnotes: 
[1]  The point being that almost any discipline at all will improve a
bad team by an order of magnitude.