

What’s Your Start-up’s “Bus Count”? Myths of Entrepreneurship and Programming - amirmc
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/06/07/whats-your-start-up-bus-count-7-myths-of-entrepreneurship-and-programming/

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Todd
There are some interesting ideas here, but it's a little heavy on opinion.
Rob's obviously an agile zealot. These myths he's refuting are not universal,
though.

For example, pair programming doesn't work for everyone, nor does the open
office + headphones arrangement. Some people are extremely productive working
alone uninterrupted.

While I agree that the "full-stack" generalist is good, sometimes you do need
people who can specialize, deep dive, and "own code"--even if others play in
that part of the code base. Some technologies actually do require hard
thinking and deep understanding of 10's of thousands of lines of code.

I'm afraid he's painting with a pretty broad brush.

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kristianp
Here is the explanation for Bus Count from the article.

"“bus count” (how many people in your team have to get hit by a bus before
you’re all dead in the water) is a critical indicator of risk for the software
start-up."

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msie
I don't like Agile. Does that make me a dinosaur?

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DanielRibeiro
I really like Eric Ries approach to suggestions: test them and see if they
help you build-measure-learn faster/better. This is because for every
suggestion there is an example of startup that did/didn't do it and it worked
fine/didn't work at all (all 4 possibilities happen).

However, if this very suggestion sounds too agile for you, then I don't know
if I can help you.

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msie
Well, I bristled when they use the word "myth" freely throughout the article,
as if you're doing things wrong if it's not pair-programming, shared-ownership
and you're employing specialists as opposed to generalists. It would be nice
to have a bunch of generalists working in your startup who all have good
knowledge of all parts of the system, but it didn't work out for me. It's hard
to find full-stack programmers and I lose some sense of pride when I don't get
ownership of a part of a system. It doesn't feel good to be replaceable. Don't
try to do agile without coaching that's for sure.

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DanielRibeiro
Couldn't agree more. All agile practices _can_ pay off, but people
underestimate the effort and the required culture for it to work. This is one
of the reasons "Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)"
[http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-
how...](http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-
in/)

