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The Visual Basic language itself is already geared toward making developers more productive. But language technology alone is not enough. It must be combined with a sound methodology and process implementation, which boosts developer productivity and, in some cases, morale. |
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Staffing the Visual Basic Project with Quality and Productivity in Mind |
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The previous section mentioned factors that improved developer productivity. Another important issue in productivity and software quality in general is whether to hire many or fewer developers on complex projects. The ideal number of developers to have on a team is in the range of four to six. This is not just a computer science finding but an idea made prominent by leading psychological and behavioral researchers. The larger the team, the more prone to political infighting, division, and diminishing returns. If you happen to be on a project currently that is staffed with 15 to 20 (or more) developers under one project, you should strongly consider breaking it up into smaller projects. As mentioned earlier, Visual Basic supports the grouping and management of many projects, so all of the smaller projects can be, like distributed architectures, decentralized yet managed by the project group. If you're developing software as part of an enterprise team, implementing this approach quickly becomes important. |
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Creating Better Enterprise Teams and Roles |
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For large and growing organizations, trying to scale up one small development team to handle growing computer needs is similar to a mayor trying to maintain a small-town presence of police officers for a city that has grown into an international metropolis. You can probably imagine the resulting rise in crime as the police force would be over-whelmed. The same holds true for a development staff. As an organization grows, development tasks and projects need to be specialized with developers duly assigned to them. For large organizations, enterprise teams are also needed to maintain common and reusable classes so that future projects are developed and implemented in optimal delivery cycles. This section addresses specialized roles. For larger organizations, you might have a team of developers performing these roles. |
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If you work for a company that is not accustomed to having a formal methodology and process in place, you're probably responsible not just for the development, but the review of technology as well. Sometimes, you have time to do this. However, at other |
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