A developer buddy sent along this great editorial by software guru Steve McConnell from the March/April 2000 issue of IEEE Software magazine. It is an interesting comparison between process heavy and “commitment” based projects - and their pathological counterparts. Does this sound familiar?

“Commitment-oriented development goes by several names including “hero-oriented development” and “individual empowerment.” Commitment-oriented organizations are characterized by hiring the best possible people, asking them for total commitment to their projects, empowering them with nearly complete autonomy, motivating them to an extreme degree, and then seeing that they work 60, 80, or 100 hours a week until the project is finished.”

This pointer was shared in response to an interview on EA’s use of BuildForge (ie, a cool software process dev tool). It smells badly of cog-in-the-machine development… Or does it?