@remi said in What is the optimal team size for a project?:
@The_Quiet_One said in What is the optimal team size for a project?:
One dev is never optimal. [...] Get hit by a bus? The project is fucked.
That is indeed the situation on most individual modules and we've been fighting for some time to solve this.
Mandatory code reviews? Plus making sure they actually run it and do some tests to confirm they know what it's doing. Forces having another pair of eyes on the same code.
Plus, I've seen regardless of the skill of that person, they inevitably end up in some kind of echo chamber where they might write some WTF code (we've all done it, let's be honest) but there's no one else to call them out on it.
This is more the part that concerns me. The devs on the core codebase have all been there for quite a long time and most external devs that happened to have a look at it have either been juniors, or only took a very passing glance. So we haven't had an exterior expert opinion since a loooooong time...
Get the juniors to review the code? No, seriously, get them to actually try to understand and ask questions about every bit that doesn't make sense to them however trivial it looks to you.
b.) Having 3 seniors who are able to share knowledge of the whole system and work on a lot of the stuff together. You'll still have people who gravitate toward ownership of certain areas of the app, but in the case where someone croaks or quits, you can still have another guy make up for the loss without much ramp up.
Which is more or less the situation on the core codebase, shared between all modules. Out of the 6 devs, 3 of us (me included) know it very well.
@ben_lubar said in What is the optimal team size for a project?:
The optimal team size is 2 people located in opposite time zones.
Joke aside, that's another issue of our team, we're spread over the whole world, Americas, Europe, Asia (mmm, we haven't anyone in Hawai yet... that's probably the only location that would make things significantly worse!). It is impossible to have a team meeting without someone being in the middle of the night. The only saving grace (I think) is that we've all moved around and know each other in person (and not only through video-conf or whatever), which makes long-distance collaboration easier.
I could probably be convinced to relocate to Hawaii to help fill the gap :P