More People != More Progress 25 Mar 2008

There is a common misconception that the best way to add capacity to a project and reduce its completion date is simple – just throw more people at it. Although there is some truth in this, it is usually applied at the wrong times and it ends up having a very negative impact on the project.

This mindset that project development is a series of tasks and that somehow you can just throw people at them and everything will work out is foreign to me, because it won’t work out – at least not when it’s applied in haste.

Adding value to a project is more than completing tasks. Tasks are not isolated during project development. They are features which build on top of one another. Making good responsible decisions and understanding the code base both technically and conceptually goes a long way to help exploit easier and better ways of implementing features. This also helps keep the code base well factored, which in turn helps teams progress consistently and avoid creating a giant roadblock of technical debt which may have lurked just ahead.