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Re: Pardon me for asking, but...

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On 10/31/2012 04:21 PM, Lew wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> Lew wrote:
>>> It is such an overwhelmingly bad idea to throw staff into the middle of a
>>> programming team in the middle of a project, with such consistently negative
>>> results when tried as has been objectively verified for decades, that Brooks
>>> is not the only one to offer the advice to avoid it, nor to substantiate that
>>> advice with evidence.
>>
>> Actually Brooke [sic] does not provide empirical evidence just a made up
>> example.
>>
>> And call the law for "Oversimplifying outrageously".
>
> Well, all right. Others have provided evidence. See McConnell's /Rapid Development/,
> for example.
>
> There's an exception to every rule, except this one.
>
> While Brooks called it an outrageous oversimplification, it turns out to be neither
> outrageous nor overly simplified.
>
> It has been observed consistently in the decades since /Mythical Man Month/'s publication
> that adding people late to a project tends to hurt more than it helps.
>
> Is this an essential characteristic of adding people late? Of course not, but in practice any
> project that throws staff into a project that's in emergency is not hep to the best practices
> of software project management, thus their emergency in the first place. For that most
> common scenario, the likelihood of such benighted management suddenly knowing how to
> integrate late staff additions is near enough to nil to strongly militate against betting in its
> favor.
>
> Theorize all you will, the practice bears out the principle.
>
There's one exception, and I've seen it often enough. The emergency may 
simply be because the project, despite decent management and otherwise 
adequate staffing, runs into a showstopper problem in a single spot, 
say. Maybe a 3rd party library has behaviour not completely in keeping 
with its announced API - I've seen that more than once. Maybe the suite 
of defects associated with a given app server is presenting a really 
thorny obstacle for a specific scenario. Maybe - this is a big and 
common maybe - the team didn't know what they didn't know, at the 
fringes and niches of a given framework...at the 11th hour they discover 
that there's just that one last bit that they were unaware of.

In all these circumstances a late addition of one or two SMEs can help, 
and often does.

I don't think Brooks was talking about the late addition of expert 
technicians like this. But it is nonetheless a late addition of staff 
that does often help.

AHS

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Pardon me for asking, but... pat.trainor@gmail.com - 2012-10-26 11:47 -0700
  Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2012-10-26 12:25 -0700
    Re: Pardon me for asking, but... David Lamb <dalamb@cs.queensu.ca> - 2012-10-26 17:15 -0400
      Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Joerg Meier <joergmmeier@arcor.de> - 2012-10-27 20:43 +0200
        Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2012-10-28 10:02 -0700
          Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2012-10-30 23:06 -0400
            Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2012-10-31 12:21 -0700
              Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2012-10-31 16:37 -0300
                Re: Pardon me for asking, but... David Lamb <dalamb@cs.queensu.ca> - 2012-10-31 18:24 -0400
                Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2012-11-06 12:39 -0800
                Re: Pardon me for asking, but... bob smith <bob@coolfone.comze.com> - 2012-11-06 11:50 -0800
        Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Gene Wirchenko <genew@ocis.net> - 2012-10-28 20:53 -0700
      Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2012-10-30 22:40 -0400
    Re: Pardon me for asking, but... pat.trainor@gmail.com - 2012-10-26 14:28 -0700
  Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2012-10-26 20:56 -0400
  Re: Pardon me for asking, but... bob smith <bob@coolfone.comze.com> - 2012-10-29 07:09 -0700
    Re: Pardon me for asking, but... David Lamb <dalamb@cs.queensu.ca> - 2012-10-29 10:38 -0400
      Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Gene Wirchenko <genew@ocis.net> - 2012-10-29 09:43 -0700
  Re: Pardon me for asking, but... Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2012-10-31 16:26 -0700

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