From 67d70ea5cfe7acd854eaf5ad537af585b39b9a5f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Andy Ko Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2017 22:05:01 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Fixed link typo. --- process.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/process.html b/process.html index ed2bbb9..e36d081 100644 --- a/process.html +++ b/process.html @@ -46,7 +46,7 @@

Pace is another factor that affects quality. Clearly, there's a tradeoff between how fast a team works and the quality of the product it can build. In fact, interview studies of engineers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, and other large companies found that the pressure to reduce "time to market" harmed nearly every aspect of teamwork: the availability and discoverability of information, clear communication, planning, integration with others' work, and code ownership (Rubin & Rinard 2016). Not only did a fast pace reduce quality, but it also reduced engineers' personal satisfaction with their job and their work. I encountered similar issues as CTO of my startup: while racing to market, I was often asked to meet impossible deadlines with zero defects and had to constantly communicate to the other executives in the company why this was not possible (Ko 2017).

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Because of the importance of awareness and communication, the distance between teammates is also a critical factor. This is most visible in companies that hire remote developers, building distributed teams. The primary motivation for doing this is to reduce costs or gain access to engineering talent that is distant from a team's geographical center, but over time, companies have found that doing so necessitates significant investments in travel and socialization to ensure quality, minimizing geographical, temporal and cultural separation (Smite 2010). Researchers have found that there appear to be fundamental tradeoffs between productivity, quality, and/or profits in these settings (Ramasubbu et al. 2011). For example, more distance appears to lead to slower communication (Wagstrom & Datta 2014). Despite these tradeoffs, most rigorous studies of the cost of distributed development have found that when companies work hard to minimize temporal and cultural separation, the actual impact on defects was small (Kocaguneli et al. 2013). Some researchers have begun to explore even more extreme models of distributed development, hiring contract developers to complete microtasks over a few days without hiring them as employees; early studies suggest that these models have the worst of outcomes, with greater costs, poor scalability, and more significant quality issues (Stol & Fitzgerald 2014).

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Because of the importance of awareness and communication, the distance between teammates is also a critical factor. This is most visible in companies that hire remote developers, building distributed teams. The primary motivation for doing this is to reduce costs or gain access to engineering talent that is distant from a team's geographical center, but over time, companies have found that doing so necessitates significant investments in travel and socialization to ensure quality, minimizing geographical, temporal and cultural separation (Smite 2010). Researchers have found that there appear to be fundamental tradeoffs between productivity, quality, and/or profits in these settings (Ramasubbu et al. 2011). For example, more distance appears to lead to slower communication (Wagstrom & Datta 2014). Despite these tradeoffs, most rigorous studies of the cost of distributed development have found that when companies work hard to minimize temporal and cultural separation, the actual impact on defects was small (Kocaguneli et al. 2013). Some researchers have begun to explore even more extreme models of distributed development, hiring contract developers to complete microtasks over a few days without hiring them as employees; early studies suggest that these models have the worst of outcomes, with greater costs, poor scalability, and more significant quality issues (Stol & Fitzgerald 2014).

While all of these research was being conducted, industry explored its own ideas about process, devising frameworks that addressed issues of distance, pace, ownership, awareness, and process improvement. Extreme Programming (Beck 1999) was one of these frameworks and it was full of ideas: