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

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

> > 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.

>If one can imagine the system then one can build the system, just a little
>slower than two, or three.

Look, this is just silly. Back of the envelope, I get 1MSLOC as something
like 4 million words to type (this is probably much too low, but let's
assume few comments and few identifiers per line), which, for a
60 wpm typist works out to 6 months of just TYPING. No thought, no design,
no documentation, no debugging, no test, no integration. Just six months
to TYPE that much code. How long do you think it would take for one human
being to actually write real code of that size? 20 years? How much code
have you written in your lifetime, in aggregate? What's the most working
documented code you've seen a single human being crank out in a year?

Modern software projects cannot be written by one person unless the
customer is willing to wait 20-40 years for delivery.

>Every new person
>adds to the communications burden and increases the chance of a
>mis-communication causing something to be misunderstood.  Misunderstandings
>lead to defects and system failures.  I'd guess seven would be the top end,
>providing you have the right seven.  Three seems to be a good number in
>practice.

This is the Mythical Man Month and all that, but it is not necessarily
true. The trick is to divide up the project into chunks (I call them
subsystems) that themselves CAN be implemented by small teams, and to
formally enforce the interfaces between the chunks. The trick then
becomes for an architect to know where to make the slices.
-- 
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