The Mythical Man-Month is one of my favorite books about managing engineering projects, and I've found it to be useful beyond just software development. The sur

The Mythical Man-Month is one of my favorite books about managing engineering projects, and I've found it to be useful beyond just software development. The surgical team principle is one that I pushed for heavily when leading a competitive robotics team in college and found to work quite well. I think that organizing an actual software development team to work in this manner would be difficult, but the limited ability to have many people working on the physical robot at once made the surgical team approach worthwhile. The book typically referenced the scarce resource of compile time, which is not a concern today. I can't really think of a good parallel to that scarcity in software development today, but in a situation like the robotics team where there was a truly scarce resource to be shared amongst the group (the robot) the surgical team approach worked excellently.