RE: "One person per product" -- MIDRANGE-L

It is very interesting that speak of this issue because I myself have a
problem with having too many programmers developing a product. I have always
proposed one program one programmer. It makes it a whole lot harder for
someone to finish a project someone else started than to end a project that
he or she started.

Terrence Daniels
Nt Administrator


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of Reeve Fritchman
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 8:30 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: "One person per product"

This is a great concept (I live it myself) but it requires complete
understanding of the project and serious coding discipline.  There is a
school of thought promoting two people working on a project (one coding, one
handling in-line review, etc.); that's interesting as well but probably not
necessary for general business iSeries stuff (but when you're in the middle
of a bunch of API's with pointers flying around like spam from
DotBizCentral, having somebody looking over your shoulder is probably a good
idea).

If you have a big project, it appears the best thing to do is to break it
into little projects and limit the people working on each project.

I found an interesting article by an IBM researcher on programmer
productivity; his message is that a two-minute telephone call really takes
17 minutes: two minutes for the call and 15 minutes to get all the mental
plates spinning again.  This makes you wonder about the efficacy of
programmers in cubicles and the concept of the open office; I guess the
solution is to provide a couple of private phone-less mini-offices with
doors and PC's with development tools only, a coder would take residence to
get privacy and productivity.


Read it? I live it!

Our customers ask us how we can develop better software with less
programmers than our competitors, and I say - because we only let
one guy work on one product, at least until it is pretty mature,
when bug fixes are allowed by newer people (scary thought, isn't
it?) But we follow some strict, commonsense standards that are
published and explained to everyone, and new people have to work
under the oversight of an experienced programmer until the quality
of the code and comments is known, along with their embrasure of
the standards.

Of course, you have to have pretty good programmers to do this. I
've  written a number of VB programs that go over ten thousand
lines (that seems like a lot to me).Our AS/400 side is all written
by one person (the best in town, at least), who is happy to tell
me 'no you can't do it THAT way.'

God bless him.

Brad Jensen
Elstore.com home of the Niagra - I mean Niagara CD Recorder for
the AS/400



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