Sometimes I assume everyone in the industry has read Fred Brooks, but that can't be true, so allow me to quote some of him. This from a review of The Design Of

Sometimes I assume everyone in the industry has read Fred Brooks, but that can't be true, so allow me to quote some of him. This from a review of The Design Of Design: Quality should be the responsibility of one person One of Brooks’s many excellent points is that quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that “somebody” can be no more than one single person—with an exception for a dynamic duo. I am surprised that Brooks does not cite Unix as an example of this claim, since we can pinpoint with almost surgical precision the moment that Unix started to fragment: in the early 1990s when AT&T spun off Unix to commercialize it, thereby robbing it of its architects. More than once in recent years, others have reached the same conclusion as Brooks. Some have tried to impose a kind of sanity, or even to lay down the law formally in the form of technical standards, hoping to bring order and structure to the bazaar. So far they have all failed spectacularly, because the generation of lost dot-com wunderkinder in the bazaar has never seen a cathedral and therefore cannot even imagine why you would want one in the first place, much less what it should look like. It is a sad irony, indeed, that those who most need to read it may find The Design of Design entirely incomprehensible. But to anyone who has ever wondered whether using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks offers well-reasoned hope that there can be a better way. http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/quality-should-be-the-responsibility-of-one-person http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/quality-should-be-the...