Tom DeMarco

There is something about human nature that makes us the implacable enemies of chaos. Whenever we encounter chaos, we roll up our sleeves and go right to work to replace it with order. But it does not follow from this that we’d be happier if there were no more chaos. On the contrary, we’d be bored to tears.

You have reached the New Status Quo when what you changed becomes what you do. An interesting characteristic of human emotion is that the more painful the Chaos, the greater the perceived value of the New Status Quo—if you can get there.

What’s in the foreground of most of our prized work memories is team interaction. When a group of people fuse into a meaningful whole, the entire character of the work changes. The challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is important because it gives us something to focus on together.

Preserve and protect successful teams. Remember that a team is a network, not a hierarchy.

Heterogeneity. A heterogeneous element, whoever this is, makes other team members understand it’s okay to not be like everyone else.

A sense of eliteness. A team can – and should – be unique in some sense. This specific feature that makes them special is an important ingredient of a jelled team.

Satisfying closure. Dividing work in pieces and making sure that each piece can be completed in a visible way gives workers a chance to feel accomplished.

The cult of quality. When team members do the best they can, it protects the company from short-term economics.

Clique control. The team phenomenon happens at the bottom of the company hierarchy. The only case when managers can become a part of a team is when they act both as managers and a group member.

Phony deadlines. People don’t believe in arbitrary deadlines dates anymore. It cannot be considered as an enjoyable challenge.

The reduced product quality. Trying to deliver a product sooner, we often compromise the quality. This can demotivate developers who are actually capable of building a better product.

Fragmentation. It has a bad impact on both efficiency and team building. Assigning one piece of work at a time can considerably decrease fragmentation.

Physical separation. It doesn’t make any sense to separate people who are supposed to work together: if they work on the same thing, they tend to make less noise.

Defensive management. It happens when a manager feels insecure and cannot protect himself from his team’s incompetence. But the problem is, the defensive tactics only makes things worse: once you’ve started leading a group, the best you can do is to trust them. People will make mistakes, but this is normal, so let them do it.

The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management. Strong managers don’t care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff’s accomplishments.

Two people from the same organization tend to perform alike. That means the best performers are clustering in some organizations while the worst performers are clustering in others.

Salary – a relationship between salary and performance was weak.

Number of defects – zero-defect workers took slightly less time to complete a task;

Years of experience – people with ten years of experience didn’t outperform those who had less experience;

Language – those who coded in old languages (COBOL or Fortran) did as well as those who coded in Pascal;

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: People work better under pressure. – Response: No, they just enjoy it less.

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: It’s about time you automated your software development staff. – Response: What software developers do is not easily automated work; it’s mostly communication.

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: Changing languages gives gains. – Response: Yes, but only on the implementation stage.

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: Technology is moving so quickly that you’re falling behind. – Response: While machines do change quickly, the business of software development stays the same.

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: Other managers get gains of 100, 200 percent or more. – Response: Forget it.

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: There is a productivity trick you’ve missed. – Response: You are not dumb enough to miss something so fundamental.

Seven False Hopes of Software Management: Backlog makes you double productivity immediately. – Response: Some projects are economic losers, and need to be in a reject pile, not in the backlog.