Prompted by @doriantaylor’s excellent piece on Agile as an industry trauma-response (https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma) I’ve been revisiting Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month. It’s always jarring how timely the problems and insights are, even when he’s talking about OS/360 war stories.
In particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about the tendency of different disciplines (design, content, engineering in particular) to argue that they should be Running The Show™ of large projects.
Taylor’s discussions of “Conceptual Integrity” — the quality of a system being self-consistent in its architecture, implementation, operation, etc — talk a lot about how this quality suffers when different pieces are conceived and made by different individuals w/different visions
It’s no wonder that small, focused teams of cross-functional “unicorns” produce work that has more of that “conceptual integrity.” Coordinating many people is hard. Coordinating many people across different disciplines is doubly hard.
The difficulty isn’t just in the growing pile of “chatter” a large team creates, or the complexity of the system itself, it’s also in getting a consistent and shared vision of what the system aught to be and how it aught to accomplish that.