Le 2012-02-16 à 01:06:00, Rich E a écrit :
I think it's something like a team developing on the same codebase; 2-3 people definitely gets the job done faster than 1, partly because it is easy to discuss your work (or in computing, synchronize).
There are few parallels to be made from teamwork of developers, especially nowadays. The problems solved by computers are of a different nature than those solved by those who program them. Problems tend to separate in two wildly different parts : the part that the computer does ; and the part of figuring out what the computer should be doing.
Often, the interactions between 2 people (or a few people) make a boost that is hard to have when working alone, because of the mental patterns involved, that often lead 2 people to catch more mistakes and do it more quickly than twice the speed of 1 person working alone. There is no such effect for parallelism within programmes.
But 4, 10, or 60 people working on the same project, well that doesn't get you anything more than the first 3. At that point, you need to redesign into components (whether it's your project or code).
Wait a minute, do you mean that the first 3 developers didn't design their programme into components in the first place ? What's a « component » here ?
But also, projects are not all created equal, components aren't created equal, teams are not created equal, and developers are all different from each other. It's hard to find something general to say about projects in general (though it's easy to pretend to have found something).
So, wild claims about 10 people not being better than 3 is some kind of fiction. I mean that although there are surely many cases in which it would be true, it largely depends on who you pick, in which kind of project, that has been structured in which way.
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