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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

You don't need many people to improve xcode. I bet 50 people could do miracles if anybody cares.

50 people would just have a lot of meetings. I bet 6 people could make a real difference though.

I actually picked a small number. With documentation, testing and everything you get pretty quickly to large teams. I bet less than 10 would be devs.

I was all-in with six. Three people to write the code. Two people to write the documentation and otherwise interface with the public. One person to answer all of the emails and attend all of the meetings and make sure nobody interrupts the other five people.

If you have headcount for "testing" then I don't want to use your software. Tests are integral to coding and should be written first.

Grandparent's not talking about unit tests. A good human tester can be very useful in finding the mysterious edge cases where the bugs roam, without wasting your developer's time doing the same.

That would be a dream but I have never seen that I a large company. Every little thing gets huge overhead.

Do you have a publicly accessible project I could inspect how this all worked out for you?

Do you use Apple software? I understand they are pretty big on manual testing.

Your process description doesn't sound anything like how I understand products are developed at Apple. Where's the headcount for the designers / UI specialists? Are you counting them as engineers?

If you have headcount for "testing" then I don't want to use your software. Tests are integral to coding and should be written first.

Yeah, if everything were synchronous, deterministic, linear, and non-interactive, life would be so much easier, and test-driven development might actually work.

Mythical man month.

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