Four keys to software projects

Tom Sweeney has released a white paper entitled The Keys to Software Projects: Four simple rules for success. If the topic seems familiar, you may have seen Tom’s presentation on the subject last year.

The four principles are identified as follows:

The Two-Pizza Rule
Small teams are significantly more productive than large teams.

The Expert Multiple
The best software developers are ten times better than the worst.

The Quality Shortcut
The effect spent on upstream quality improvement and assurance tasks is more than offset by the reduction in the high costs of resolving defects downstream.

Iterative and incremental development
Instead of trying to guess what is needed ahead of time, build a little something and then evaluate how it needs to change to better fit the situation.

Note that the paper goes into much more detail on these principles, citing empirical evidence to support the laws. I have only tried to capture the main idea of each point. The principles all seem pretty accurate from my own experience.

There’s a lot of talk about training more software developers. I’m very much of the opinion that a major job-skill mismatch is occurring that is preventing developer jobs from being filled. But a rule like the “expert multiple” makes me wonder if more focus should be put on taking junior developers and helping them become experts.

What do you think of these laws?