On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > Sure some tasks like simulators etc are big and
> > need 1000's of
> > person hours, but if 1000 people each wrote a small module,
> > it would take no
> > more than 5 hours per person (assuming it would take one
> > person 2000 hours).
>
> No way, unless it is trivial software. In my experience productivity is
> more like the logarithmical than linear in the number of persons
> involved.

I agree and add that of those 1000 people, 10 of them are faster than the
other 990 combined. Of those remaing 990, 900 aren't cabable of even
starting a 2000 person hour project. Of the 90 remaining, 80 don't have
the persistance to finish. If these statistics are valid (and I think
they're conservative), then the failure rate for projects is on the order
of 90%.

I'm not trying to be critical here. Ask Andy Warren how efficient an
individual programmer can be.

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