

Who Needs Process? - baha_man
http://teddziuba.com/2011/12/process.html

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georgebarnett
Whenever I see somebody saying "Who needs process" or "Process is overkill",
it's usually followed up with how they work in a small team.

Having no process may work well in a small team where you can walk over and
chat to the other folks in the team, but that's an implicit process:

"Our process is to talk to each other face to face and do pull requests, but
we don't call it process because that's a dirty word".

When there's only a few of you, it's easy to get everybody pulling in the same
direction. This becomes much harder when you have an organisation with several
thousand people in it.

At some point your team / product group may expand past the point where its
reasonable to fit the whole team and all the other teams (eg QA, Sysadmin,
DBA's, Networks, BI, Sales, etc) there's a dependency on in the same room. At
that point, trying to maintain face to face interaction breaks down completely
and you need to start defining processes that result in effective interaction
between members of disparate teams who may not even know each other exist.

One way to avoid this problem would be to not increase the size of your team
or product, but that doesn't solve the issue of needing to develop something
large, like say Mac OSX or Linux.

Speaking of Linux - even the kernel has a strict process for getting things
done. It's how they manage large numbers of commit's from all sorts of people
without going completely insane.

------
swah
That could work until everyone is on the same room.

~~~
adulau
"Same room" is another factor being independent of the fact of having or not a
process for software development. I think the article proposal is close to the
proposal "Programming, Motherfucker Do you speak it?" - <http://programming-
motherfucker.com/>

I have seen a lot of enterprise making "software development" avoiding
programming by replacing it with an ugly process. Just to avoid doing the real
job of programming. If I look for the past years in my narrow view, usually
the most successful ones are the ones focusing on programming and nothing
more.

