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Comment by semiotagonal | Hacker News Reader

I'm beginning to think the real answer for software development is to stop wanting a process. A team either clicks, or it doesn't. I think this happens no matter what process is attempted.

EDIT: Obviously there should be acceptance criteria for the product, especially where safety is a concern; but the day-to-day process is just going to be what it is.

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I don’t understand why some areas would warrant the response of “sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t”. What if we left other areas examined? “Let’s not bother to research sorting algorithms further. Some people write a sort and it goes fast, and some people write one and it goes slow, and that’s just the way it is”.

If a team can just “click”, isn’t it critically important to figure out why this occurs, so we can create other teams that click? It would be an awful shame if we were not as a species able to make effective use of all of us because we preferred to leave this to chance.

I think it's just very hard to generalize from the performance of a combination of people that each have unique personalities and abilities. It's hard to even know what to measure.

For a sorting algorithm, you know what to analyze, and you know the result is generalizable.

No one has even bothered to use Fred Brooks' recommendations in nearly 50 years, despite praising his book up and down without reading it.

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