[Nottingham] Connect 3D Radeon 7000 AGP and Five Button Mouse info

Martin Garton martin at stupids.org
Fri Oct 28 16:45:16 BST 2005


On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 16:12 +0100, Robert Hart wrote:

> > Look at Gnome and
> > KDE. We have half the group that is willing to do that kind of work
> > duplicating the work of the other half. If we only had one or the other,
> > we would be twice as far along now. 
> 
> Yeah right. You know as well as I do that software development really
> doesn't scale all that well. Doubling the number of programmers on a
> project will not get it done twice as fast. 

I agree. This is like the farm manager who wasn't getting enough yield
from his crop in a small field run by 20 farmers, so to speed things up
he added more farmers and was surprised when it made no difference to
the yield, but the farmers ended up discussing everything more.

Not enough farmers on one field (or developers on one project) and the
yield is lower than you would want. Too many farmers in a field and you
get a too many cooks situation.

On a less abstract note, I have personally witnessed and been involved
in at least two projects where management decisions to increase the
number of developers due to rapidly approaching deadlines has noticeably
slowed development and pushed the project further back.  The problem
with this is that it's counter-intuitive and some people seem prepared
to believe their intuition even when it flies in the face of the
available evidence.

-- 
Martin.





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