My Finetix colleague, Chris, just reminded me of the lunchtime conversation we had a few days ago with one of our good friends from RiskFocus. It got me thinking about an interesting model for development.
Think of what a General Contractor does when you do construction on a home. He gets (hopefully) the best-of-breed specialists to perform certain functions. He has one company to do the foundation, another to do the framing, another to do the electrical wiring, and another to do the sheet rock and spackling. Each of these tasks is done efficiently by the tradesman, and then it is understood that they move on to another construction job.
I am wondering if anyone has followed this model in developing systems. A "General Contractor" gets the best consultants around to perform a specific specialist task, something that they do best. The job lasts for one month, and then the contractor moves to a different development job. There would be a specialist to write the framework, a specialist to plug in the security and entitlements, a specialist to write the Web Services and fix any interoperability issues, a specialist to write the calculation engines, and then a GUI specialist to plug in a front end. Each member of this well-oiled team would be versed in the various interfaces and abstractions that the other members of the team use, so that the security specialist would come in, and know immediately where to hook in his stuff to various parts of the framework.
The members of the team would rotate amongst the various specialties so they do not end up getting tagged as a master in only a single discipline.
I have never seen this model being used, but I would be curious if anyone has ever tried it.
Your comments are welcome.
©2005 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Monday, December 19, 2005
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