3 ms·

While their overall point is valid, they seem to be overly tolerant of straw in the examples they knock down. Eg: > Hale's story misses that the slower pace at

by a1369209993 4y ago

While their overall point is valid, they seem to be overly tolerant of straw in the examples they knock down. Eg: > Hale's story misses that the slower pace at large organizations is less about the growing size of the team and more about the growing size and complexity of the codebase and the product. In a Hale-like model, the growing size and complexity of the codebase and the product are communication and contention costs. Unless you wrote the entire codebase yourself (and probably even if you did), you are communicating and contending with the other authors of that codebase, using the codebase itself as a communication medium. Getting rid of other communication and contention costs provides a constant-factor improvement to a process that is still asymtotically quadratic. (Ie, O(a*N^2+b*N^2+...) is still O(N^2) as long as any of a, b, ... are nonzero.)

twitchard 4y ago
That's pretty silly. What "shared resources" am I contending with previous developers for? It's not like "oops, I can't deploy to the QA environment now, it's in use by somebody who left in 2015" Also all the remedies he suggests (keeping your responsibility assignment matrix small) would make absolutely no sense if "communication costs" was dominated by the cost of communicating with developers in the past. By any reasonable reading communication costs refers to developers simultaneously working on a task (in analogy to parallel processes).
- a1369209993 4y ago
  > What "shared resources" am I contending with previous developers for? FTA: > CI takes 30 minutes to run when it used to take 3? Fire everybody, and it'll still take 30 minutes to run. You are contending with them (specifically, the code (tests, etc) they wrote) for CI runtime. The code doesn't go away just because the developer who wrote it is gone. > all the remedies he suggests Are specific to the low-hanging fruit of scenarios that do not include firing every other developer - I wrote "In a Hale-like model" for a reason.
  - twitchard 4y ago
    That's not what resource contention means. Resource contention means two people (or processes) want the same thing and only one can have it at a time.

twitchard 4y ago

That's pretty silly. What "shared resources" am I contending with previous developers for? It's not like "oops, I can't deploy to the QA environment now, it's in use by somebody who left in 2015" Also all the remedies he suggests (keeping your responsibility assignment matrix small) would make absolutely no sense if "communication costs" was dominated by the cost of communicating with developers in the past. By any reasonable reading communication costs refers to developers simultaneously working on a task (in analogy to parallel processes).

a1369209993 4y ago
> What "shared resources" am I contending with previous developers for? FTA: > CI takes 30 minutes to run when it used to take 3? Fire everybody, and it'll still take 30 minutes to run. You are contending with them (specifically, the code (tests, etc) they wrote) for CI runtime. The code doesn't go away just because the developer who wrote it is gone. > all the remedies he suggests Are specific to the low-hanging fruit of scenarios that do not include firing every other developer - I wrote "In a Hale-like model" for a reason.
- twitchard 4y ago
  That's not what resource contention means. Resource contention means two people (or processes) want the same thing and only one can have it at a time.