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This is exactly what The Mythical Man Month laid out 35 years ago. I doubt anything will come along that could ever really compensate for the network effect of large teams; nothing new under the sun...


Open source (decentralised Linux style) seems to have compensated for the network effect of large teams. Hence why Linux is 3.0 and HURD still hasn't shipped ;)

points at CatB http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

I think part of the poor performance of large teams is because as soon as the business is big enough to have large teams, it's big enough that it starts having middle managers and PHBs. Large teams are only bad because of the conventional commercial software development practices (waterfall, anyone?)


With a big team managers enforce something like waterfall and that why it dosn't work. Nice.

Large teams should be more decentralised like Linux, Order emerges out of chaos adding manager that enforce correct use of waterfall want be good.




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