Chapter Three The Surgical Team

The Problem Large Group – 10:1 productivity and 5:1 program speed and space management. – Negative aspect Sheer number is causes miscommunication and cost money Brutal force approach is slow and costly by large number

The Problem Small Group – To slow for big system projects – Takes longer to produce product – But more integrity and efficient

Mill’s proposed solution!! Founder of Software Engineering Technology First breaking up a larger job into smaller ones Second having a “Surgical Team” – One does the cutting and the others give them the support to enhance productivity and effectiveness – No hog-butchering a project by many programmers – No many people cutting away at one problem

The Surgeon Designs program Codes it Tests it Writes Documentation Knows the language the program is coded in Has access to computer system which runs different version of their code Allows easy file updates and text editing for documentations

The Surgeon - Characteristics 10 years of experience and highly talented Has considerable system and application knowledge Experienced in applied mathematics Has business data experience

The Copilot The alter ego of the surgeon Able to do any part of the job but is less experienced Their function: share design thinking, discussant, and evaluator Discusses function and interfaces of team with other teams

The Copilot- Characteristics Knows code of the team’s project intimately Researches alternative design strategies

Administrator Handles money, people, space, and machines Interacts and is the “business face” for the team. Can be administrator for several teams Surgeon has last decisions on everything

The editor The surgeon writes and produces all the documentation The editor criticizes, reworks, provides references and bibliography, produces several version of it, and oversees mechanics of productions

Secretary One secretary for the administrator – Handles project correspondence and non-product files One secretary for the editor

Program Clerk Maintains all technical records of teams programming- product library Responsible for machine and human readable files Input and output files for program go through the program clerk Specializes in relieving programmers of clerical chores, systematizes and takes care of neglected chores Transforms programming from private property to team property

The Toolsmith There are file-editing, text-editing, and interactive debugging services and programs that do the work for you. These must be reliable and readily available to the surgeon Toolsmith function is to make sure the adequacy of the services. Constructs, maintains, and upgrades special tools for the surgeon

The tester Surgeon needs testers to test sections codes and the program as a whole. Has regular testing for day-by-day debugging.

The language Lawyer Mastery of intricacies of programming language used. They find neat and efficient ways for the language to do difficult, obscure, or tricky things

How it works The surgical teams split of the work of the bigger project The partners of the team are equal – Causing communication and comprising of project – The have to plan before programming

More Problems This is a great concept but still has difficult when applied to larger projects. Separate techniques have to be used in order to solve this problem which are discussed in further chapters System architect has to be implemented