Software development productivity comes from problems avoided by a high level of trust, cooperation, and teamwork.
Highly Effective Software Development Teams
The highly effective teams I have been a member of used a rapid prototyping approach to help bound uncertainties/risks in the project and delayed making decisions when more information would improve the situation, unless any further delay was effectively a decision. I think that a lot of individual productivity comes from problems avoided by a high level of trust, cooperation, and teamwork.
I think that there are broadly three classes of skills needed to develop software that customers pay for and use:
- Customer Development: figuring out what the customer really needs, and will use and pay for,
- Design: architecting a solution,
- Deployment/Operations: getting it debugged and into operation.
I have seen folks that were excellent in one of the three areas and good in the others, but the best teams seem to have different people taking the lead on these three aspects of defining and delivering a system.
Steve McConnell on the Origin of 10X variation
This post was inspired by Steve McConnell’s Productivity Variations Among Software Developers and Teams: The Origin of “10x” which noted that “A study by Norm Augustine (“Augustine’s Laws and Major System Development Programs“) found that in a variety of professions–writing, football, invention, police work, and other occupations–the top 20 percent of the people produced about 50 percent of the output, whether the output is touchdowns, patents, solved cases, or software. When you think about it, this just makes sense. We’ve all known people who are exceptional students, exceptional athletes, exceptional artists, exceptional parents–these differences are just part of the human experience; why would we expect software development to be any different?”
Augustine later published his laws as a book “Augustine’s Laws” (1986) [Archive]
Great post on the synergy of software development teams! You’re absolutely right about the three classes of skills and how the best teams have different people taking on these aspects.
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