[wp-hackers] Amount of estimated developer-hours in Wordpress?

[Mike Schinkel]

On Aug 17, 2010, at 3:26 PM, Dougal Campbell wrote:
> On Aug 16 2010 3:46 PM, Arlen Beiler wrote:
>> 34 Person years means it would take 34 people one year or one person
>> 34 years to do that. Correct?
> 
> I used to have a wise manager who was fond of pointing out that just because 1 woman can have a baby in 9 months, it doesn't mean that 9 women can have a baby in 1 month. (he also liked to observe that, "when the only tool you have is a chainsaw, every problem looks like a zombie.")
> 
> As the size of a development team goes up, efficiency often goes down. Or more concisely, development productivity does not (typically) scale linearly. This is part of the reason that small-team methodologies have been pretty popular for a while. That's not to say that a large team can't get things done. But often the best way to manage large teams is to first plan things out meticulously, then break into smaller teams to tackle orthogonal parts of the project.

You are (he was) just quoting "The Mythical Man Month"...  :-)

-Mike