Surgical Team

In The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks proposed the surgical team as a solution to an apparent contradiction: large projects require large amounts of work, but large teams produce prohibitive communication overhead. His answer was to organize the team around a single chief programmer — the surgeon — supported by specialists: copilot, administrator, editor, secretary, clerk, toolsmith, tester, language lawyer. The surgeon made all design decisions, wrote the critical code, and held the conceptual integrity of the system. Communication was radial rather than meshed: everyone communicated with the surgeon, but not with each other about design. The model reduced the overhead from n(n−1)/2 to n−1. It was admired in textbooks and rarely implemented in practice, because the support specialists were expensive and most organizations could not afford eight professionals supporting one programmer.