[Zope] Managing networked projects / Outsourcing work

[Brad Clements]

On 1 Nov 2003 at 1:56, Heimo Laukkanen wrote:

> ( Just a good read :
> http://www.nwc.com/story/singlePageFormat.jhtml;jsessionid=LZX3DXZCSO1U0QSNDBGCKHQ?articleID=15201900

I guessed what this link would point to, since I've also sent out this URL (w/o sessionid) 
to a few lists last week.

Brooks "Mythical Man Month - 20th anniversay ed" has an interesting "20 years later" 
followup chapter. The issues which you've mentioned in your posting still exist. Adding 
team members adds overhead due to increased communication requirements.

I didn't like his chapter on "the surgical team", but now that you've mentioned CMF and 
Plone, I think that these two "products" have progressed well perhaps due to the 
"surgeon is God" approach. 

The "surgical team" chapter in Brooks' book is antiquated, but the overall concept 
seems to be applicable to a some open-source projects where one or two champions 
spearhead an adhoc group of developers (each of whom, in some small way, want their 
own extensions or features in the base product).

I agree that outsourcing "temporary overload work" will be more successful when it 
involves small, standalone components that can be completely specified in some 
limited number of documentation pages. 

The bigger the spec, the larger the ambiguity. I suppose this means that only "trivial" 
parts of a larger project can be effectively outsourced. And if they're trivial, you won't 
outsource them because it'll only take a small amount of time to do those things. 
(Except that you have lots of small things to do).

I'm hoping to see some real world experiences relayed in this thread.

-- 
Brad Clements,                bkc at murkworks.com   (315)268-1000
http://www.murkworks.com                          (315)268-9812 Fax
http://www.wecanstopspam.org/                   AOL-IM: BKClements