Man or machine?

The worst crime committed against developers is the invention of the project role that so many methodologies focus on.

It may be a wet dream of project managers to view developers as replaceable coding units, but it has nothing to do with reality. You just can't take three programmers, add two ounces of designers and stir with a tablespoon of testers to make a fully functional team.

It is surprising how often management tends to see a development team as a linearly scalable biomass. Despite Brooks's Mythical Man-Month being over 25 years old, adding people to a late software project still is the reflex behaviour of far too many managers when pressure builds up. But it still doesn't work.

Only when we can stand up and chant "We are all individuals" in a Life Of Brian way and recognize that developers have different skills, experiences and limitations, can we learn how to form project teams successfully.