Von: "SD Magazine"<sd@newsletters.sdmediagroup.com>
 Betreff: SD People & Projects: Mo' Developers, Mo' Problems?
 Datum: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:09:26 -0400 (EDT)

 SD PEOPLE & PROJECTS

 October 2005: Bigger Teams Not Always Better
 By Amit Asaravala

 >>>> MO' DEVELOPERS, MO' PROBLEMS?

 Thinking about assigning more developers to a project
 to accelerate your schedule? Be careful. Putting a large
 team on the job could cause you more trouble than it's
 worth, according to a new study by software estimation
 and analytics vendor QSM.

 The study, based on data that QSM collected from 564
 information systems projects completed since 2002,
 revealed that large teams don't complete projects much
 faster than small teams, though they cost much more. In
 particular, teams with 34 people on average completed a
 100,000-line project in 5.6 months at a cost of $2.1
 million, while teams of four people on average took
 about two weeks longer but cost just $294,000. Thus,
 shaving two weeks off the schedule cost some companies
 as much as $1.84 million.

 Why such disproportionate production rates? Blame it
 on the bugs. The larger teams produced more than five
 times as many bugs as the smaller teams, which required
 the teams to reexamine their code more often, according
 to QSM. In the end, this ate into a large portion of
 the time saved by having more developers turn out more
 code per day.

 But before you decide to cut your team back to just
 four people, consider this: The size of the small team
 in the study was just an average, and QSM readily admits
 that it's saving the question of "optimum" team size for
 a future study.

 Rather, the real lessons here are that you'd better be
 sure that accelerating your schedule by adding more
 developers is worth the extra cost, and that you should
 have realistic expectations about how many days you'll
 actually save by doing so.

 --Amit Asaravala