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

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>     Real chief programmer teams are very rare. I've never heard of one
>other than in Brooks' book.

Given your description below, I don't find this surprising, since I
find it impossible. Read on.

>It's organized like a surgical team.  The chief
>programmer personally writes most of the delivered code, and everything else
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>is set up to facilitate this.

Tommyrot! How on earth is a single human being going to write "most",
or, for that matter, even a FRACTION, of the code on a project of
significant size? I'm talking here of things like the multi-MILLION
line FAA rewrite of the U.S. air traffic control system. No, what is
needed is a single architect (or at least a very small number of
architects on a tightly focused team) who set up the groundrules for
the overall system. After that, a horde of implementors can hammer
out the individual subsystems.

What you describe sounds like something that MIGHT work, but only on
a programming-in-the-small project, which I'm not particularly interested
in (I view programming-in-the-small as a solved problem).

>    It's too much of a culture shock for most organization.

As would be any unworkable scheme. ;-)
-- 
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