Why scale teams?

November 23, 2007 • 1 min read


This post is over ten years old. Chances are, I've learned enough to have advanced my thinking about some of this stuff.

There are a lot of tools (Java, use case diagrams, etc.) that are chosen because they can scale software development so that a large team of people can work on the same code. Reg Braithwaite asks why the common wisdom is to scale the team up in numbers, rather than up in productivity:

If everything we know about teams suggests that smaller teams have the greatest productivity, isn’t it a valid choice to invest heavily in tools and processes that are specifically tuned to maximizing the productivity of small teams?


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