Re: chief programmer team organizations was (c++ vs ada results)

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>He finally resorted to making the redesign but leaving a few obvious simple 
>flaws that even she could detect, presenting the design to her for review 
>and asking her help in solving those last sticky "problems".  She saved 
>her ego, the software was corrected but the poor guy at the bottom had to 
>suffer through this several times and the lead got the credit when it worked.
>He would have done better to let the project fail if his goal was to advance in
>the organization.  This project structure is not very forgiving if you place
>people too high or low in the hierarchy.

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain." Sadly, this
sounds like a fairly typical project. I swear, when I get in a bad mood
I half believe the single most effective solution to what ails most
troubled software development efforts would be to simply shoot every
third manager. Arghh.

On the other hand, the project I described in my earlier post was
QUITE atypical. They chose Ada on its merits (didn't have to use it--just
evaluated what was available and decided Ada was the only viable tool
for solving their problem). They had a superb chief architect. They
knew they were building 4 ships in a row, so they focused on reuse from
the start as a MULTI-project objective (achieving, in the end, 70% reuse
across the four projects and $117 million in savings [their numbers]).
They made optimal use of Rational's technology. They were just wonderful.
It's projects like this that make it all worthwhile...just wish there
were more like it.
-- 
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