Uwe Fischer wrote: > Hi Michael, > > Michael Meeks wrote: >> So - my experience is that the more people involved in a decision - the >> less likely any decision is to be taken: consider the difficulty of >> choosing a restaurant with 3 people vs. 10 people. "I don't like >> Chinese", "I can't walk far", "I know this place ..." >> >> Do you observe that phenomena too ? [ every week ? ] > > sure. Every day. > But still your 10 people will come up - after some discussion - with a > choice that the majority can live with. While by not asking in advance, > you would end up with a not so pleasing choice like what we encountered > on a certain Sunday evening in Lyon... (insider joke)
Don't need to be 10 people (and perhaps it shouldn't be 10). But more than one or two. I remember an interesting study of the University of Illinois. It describes that two people working together on a common task where not better than one very skilled person, but groups with 3 people always have been better than the most skilled individual. People with 4 or 5 haven't been a lot better in this study. The explanation was that a group is much better in finding mistakes and wrong ideas early and so can work more efficiently by concentrating on what has to be done. But the group is still small enough to avoid overhead. Adding more people to the group didn't add more "group advantage" in this study but I think the exact number depends on the kind of the task and the peoples skill sets. I assume that for coding in a big and complex application the number can be higher, not lower. So it can't be applied to coding number by number but IMHO it clearly shows that results have a much bigger chance to get better when you don't work alone. BTW: groups of 3 perfectly match our smallest possible Feature iTeam (development/QA/documentation). I agree with Michael that this doesn't work if one of them doesn't do the job right, but that shouldn't be taken as an excuse do work alone, it should be used as a reason to fight for improvement. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
