Interesting -- I'll have to see if I can pick up a copy of this book.

However, it does make me wonder, what literature there is for smaller teams, say 1-3? When I started work at my current employer, I was joining a one-mean team, but about 18 months later, my team-mate left. So I've been working as a one-man team for the last three years or so.

That has its advantages and disadvantages, depending, I suppose, on the personality involved. For example, with two people on the team, we often used extreme programming (XP) to write reams of code. Now that I'm on my own, there's a SysAdmin who sometimes sits with me as I wrote code now. While he's a smart guy, he's probably not be getting 100% of what I'm writing in Perl or SQL. It's still nice to have someone in the co-pilot's seat while I write code and explain my thought processes.

I do know one thing about a small team -- you have to get on well with each other, otherwise productivity goes way down. The good news about a one-man team is that I can have a team meeting in my head. And .. that can be a bad thing too. :)

Actually, I've found that the best time for a team meeting is The Next Day, if I'm really stuck. Another approach is to explain the problem to someone like my wife; she doesn't know much about software development, but she's a really good listener. This usually results in my explanation tailing off as I race off to look for a pen, so that I can write down the solution that's just occurred to me.

My other outs are dropping in on Perlmonks or visiting #perl on freenode .. asking and answering questions on-line always gets my creative juices flowing.

And, of course, without coffee I'd be lost. Anyone else have comments about a Development Team of One?

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Re: Interesting insights from Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by talexb
in thread Interesting insights from Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by tilly

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