Rich Kulawiec writes:
> I got to thinking about this issue in re-reading my own comments. One of
> the general principles of this game seems to be that anything designed
> by one or two very bright individuals has a fighting chance of turning
> out brilliant; anything designed by committee (even a well-intentioned one)
> tends to be unwieldly, bloated, and otherwise a general mess.
Correct indeed. Go pick up Brook's The Mythical Man-Month. The
phrase you're looking for is "conceptual unity", and it's very hard
indeed to preserve conceptual unity in a design put together by a
committee. Brook's recommended solution is to assign everybody
specific roles in the project, with a chief architect in charge to
keep the project conceptually unified.
In general there don't seem to be a lot of alternatives to this
approach, although there are some techniques. For example, usability
engineering tries to develop the concept methodically with repeatable
practices, rather than have it be conceived in somebody's mind. And
software engineering practices involve making the concept more
explicit and well defined.
Ultimately, though, any time you include more than a few people
in the design process, the extra people are usually there to fulfill
purposes that have little to do with the actual design itself -
achieving buy-in, keeping everybody politically happy, making sure
nobody's toes get stepped on, etc. Preserving conceptual unity in
that situation consists mostly of cajoling the members of the group
into consensus and getting them to think it was their own idea.
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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