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

[nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle)]

jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:

>>     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.

      There's a school of thought that if you're writing something that big,
your approach is wrong, and you need to develop some abstraction that makes
the job smaller and moves most of the specifics into some kind of database.

      But what Brooks was talking about was a job of the size of an
operating system kernel, a compiler, or a typical shrink-wrapped
application.  Many such jobs are something a single person could write
with adequate support; examples of each of the above written by individuals
exist.  There are also examples of each of the above written by large
teams, of course.  

      With respect to the FAA application, it's entirely possible that
the whole system will be obsoleted by something that has most of the
smarts in the airplanes, perhaps a successor to ACAS with GPS inputs.
Articles in Aviation Leak indicate that distributed systems are being
worked on, especially for Europe, where cross-border ATC isn't well
integrated.

				John Nagle