Self Organising Teams and Formal Software Development
The Agile Advice blog has links to two interesting articles that have been recently rerepublished by Fast Company.
Engines of Democracy (from 1999). Self organising teams who build jet engines for General Electric.
Manufacturing jet engines may not be like developing software, but…
The most interesting measure may be one that the people at GE/Durham talk about themselves. They don’t really think that their main job it to make jet engines. They think that their main job is to make jet engines better.
They Write the Right Stuff (from 1996). Writing software for the space shuttle. Their process is the opposite of agile, but the article gives insight into the effort, cost and discipline required to write (almost) bug free software.
Some of the figures are astounding:
- Budget of $35 million per year.
- Team of 260.
- 2,500 pages of documentation for a change that required 6,366 lines of code.
- 40,000 pages of documentation.
- One error in each of the last three releases (420,000 lines of code).
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