At 11:49 AM 11/29/02 +0100, J. van Baardwijk wrote:
At 19:06 28-11-2002 -0500, Dee Daley wrote:That works for things like programming and support, but it has one major flaw when applied to projects as a whole: it is impossible to hold the (time-consuming but necessary) meetings (even when using methods like chat or video conferencing), because there will also be members of the project group for whom the scheduled time will be in the wee hours of the night -- during which they will probably be asleep.Jeroen wrote- Following that reasoning, the job could be done in only six months by working 24 hours per day. Unfortunately, it is more complicated than that. Things like the need for rest, recreation and social activities tend to get in the way. Dee- This reminds me of the "global" company approach that was touted years ago. I don't hear much about it now, but it involved 2-3 sets of individuals around the world on a single team. A project could be started by one person in the morning and handed off to someone in another time zone, to allow for a kind of continuous problem solving/programming.
Another problem which Brooks points out is that as the number of people working on the same project increases, the number and length of meetings necessary for co-ordination between the workers (even if they are in the same building) also increases, to the point where adding additional people to the project may actually slow the project down because the additional man-hours required for discussion and co-ordination among the team members (whether formal staff meetings or just one person interrupting another with a phone call) will actually exceed the number of man-hours that the new people can spend actually writing code (or whatever the job is) . . .
--Ronn! :)
I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon.
I never dreamed that I would see the last.
--Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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