Apple does this, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon did (in their quest to reduce everything to replaceable cogs). You create three teams, and get them

Apple does this, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon did (in their quest to reduce everything to replaceable cogs). You create three teams, and get them to work on basically the same problem. Apple will often give them slightly different scope (port OSX to the iPhone, add functionality to the iPod OS, see which project can ship first / deliver the best product). Problem solving is more or less lognormal. You can squash a trivial bug in minutes or weeks, depending on whether or not you spot the cause of it. This can actually save man hours - as you don't have someone staring at stack dumps for weeks without making any progress whatsoever - you just tell them on the second day that a co-worker found the error, and ask if they can think of any other things that might be wrong (now that they've got the provisional fix). I can see a lot of comments worrying about the efficiency of this - what if two people solve the problem at the same time? What if the quick fix isn't a good? Well, that's a good problem to have - one engineer / team didn't really fix it, and one did - you've just saved yourself from the risk of missing the root cause! Yes, there might be a few painful meetings, especially when two different approaches have been shown to work. If patching the iPod OS and porting OSX both seem to work, it's going to cause an ugly political showdown. But it would be more political if neither team had written a line of code, and were simply duelling with Powerpoint (Keynote?) presentations to back up the viability of their approach.