When Smart Developers Generate Crappy Code 195
itwbennett writes "If you've ever worked on a team you can probably recall a time when, as a group, you produced work that was not as good as any one of you could have done on your own. Sarah Mei had this sort of sub-par teamwork experience, which she shared in her session at the O'Reilly Fluent Conference this week. Mei 'spoke about a time she worked on a team with really expert developers. Every one of them was someone whom you'd admire, who had previous written code that you and I would boast to have created. Yet, these smart people created modules that didn't talk to each other. And its quality was, to be kind, on the rotten side.' It's not an uncommon story, but why and how does it happen? The answer, says Mei, is that code quality 'is defined by its patterns of dependencies,' not all of which have equal weight. And, as it turns out, team communication is the heaviest dependency of all."
Re:Coding Architecture Models (Score:4, Interesting)
At that point it doesn't matter how crappy your code is, all it is is isolated to a single portion of a layer with inputs and outputs and relatively modularized as a result in regards to similar models.
You're assuming that people actually put in that separation all the time. Just because you are using an MVC framework doesn't mean things are separated like they should be. Just like declaring something with "class" doesn't automatically make it (good) OO.
Who says they were great coders? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because they name drop does mean they are great coders, only that they are great at self promotion. Who's to say that some silent but really competent coder wasn't responsible for the code they take credit for? I think what you saw was not "great coders can't work together," but instead, "great projects have many unsung heroes."
Re:I work in groups so it happens faster (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you are totally wrong, usually people don't bother communicating, so you don't lose a lot of time on communication.
It takes longer because of Ringelmann's effect, and this had been measured in 1914, by measuring efforts.
Here is the original article in french: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54409695.image.f14 [gallica.bnf.fr]
When you have 1 guy, he works at 100%, but when you add 1 guy, you get 93% of their combined force.
Here is the table from 1 to 8:
1 => 100%
2 => 93%
3 => 85%
4 => 77%
5 => 70%
6 => 63%
7 => 56%
8 => 49%
With 8 people, you get the results of 4 people !
In fact, when you add people in a team, everybody reduces his level to the supposed level of the group.
If I'm alone, I think I'm the best, so I'll work at my best level.
If there is another guy, I'll work according to our common level, so I'll reduce my effort.
When you have a team, the team works at the lowest common level.
You can also see that when people walk in groups, they walk together at the slowest speed.