Re: [tlug] Giving a program priority briefly

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > 
 > > I would guess you would start to run into problems if you tried to
 > > scale this process into a team larger than 5 programmer members.
 > 
 > Actually, I've scaled it up to eight with no problems. It could go
 > further.

Hell, you could claim it's already scaled to many thousand, simply by
listing all SF projects with one developer.  The question is, have you
scaled it in a project with complex dependencies among more than 5
programmers' areas of responsibilities?  Since you talk about
"stories" and "agile clients", I'd be willing to bet not.

Note, I make no claims that you're not achieving great success with
your process.  Nor do I think it's an accident.  However, there are a
lot of tasks that it's simply not suited to in my opinion (eg,
maintaining an Emacs or a kernel), and thus I object to the universal
quantifiers implicit in the propositions about the "natural order of
refactoring, functional improvement, and optimization" people have
been tossing around.

 > On the other hand, what do I know? If you'd asked me whether or not
 > you could create a pretty darn solid and sophisticated OS kernel by
 > recruiting several hundred random not-so-sophisticated programmers
 > spread across the globe and letting them have at it in their spare time,
 > well, I wouldn't have had a lot of hope for the result.

I still don't.  It hasn't happened yet.  Just because the lkml doesn't
look like a SEI-certified CMM Level 5 shop doesn't mean that Linux
doesn't have a superb group of project managers, top-notch engineers
that anybody would be happy to have, and a very solid process.