Software Project Development Teams

Team Organization

• Goal: organize teams so that they are productive

• teams can be used in every phase, especially implementation

• two extreme approaches:– democratic team– chief programmer team

Democratic Team

• Group works for a common cause with no single leader; each member finds faults in others’ code

• advantages– positive attitude towards finding faults– especially productive in solving hard problems

• disadvantages– management has difficulty working with egoless team– senior members may resent review by beginners

Chief Programmer Team• Introduced in the 70’s, in the keypunch days• chief programmer

– directs and reviews work of other team members – does design and complex implementations

• backup chief programmer • other programmers

– specialized; work on detailed design and coding• programming secretary (librarian)

– maintains project library (code, test cases, etc.)– compiles, executes and runs test cases

Impracticality of chief programmer approach

• Good chief programmers are hard to find– must be both good programmer and good manager

• Good backup chief programmers are even harder to find

• Nowadays programmers compile, run and test their software at their workstations

• Disadvantage: chief is present at code reviews and also does evaluation of members; doesn’t foster positive attitude toward finding faults

Combined approach (Modern Team)• Team leader

– responsible for technical aspects– attends all code reviews

• team manager– responsible for non-technical aspects (budget,

performance appraisals)– does not attend code reviews, but assesses

performance based on periodic team meetings• can be scaled up for large projects• decentralize decision-making

Synchronize-and-Stabilize Team• Used by Microsoft Corp.• Work is divided into several builds; first build is for

most critical features• Each build carried out by a number of small teams

working in parallel• All teams synchronize daily by putting partially

completed components together, testing, debugging• Stabilize at the end of each build• Advantages:

– ensures components work together– get early insight into operation of the product

Synchronize and Stabilize Team Organization

• Program manager leads each team• 3 to 8 developers per team• 3 to 8 testers work one-on-one with developers• Team is given specifications, team members

design and implement their portion• Must meet at regular times for synchronization• advantages:

– promotes individual creativity– daily synchronization promotes communication and

coordination