Nomadic Programming

No, I don't mean driving all around town to program... Which isn't to say that wouldn't be fun. This refers to the tendency for a team to work on almost every module of a product at the same time.

So, how do you tell if this is happening? Draw a picture of your project. Break down your project into its major components. Pick a color scheme. This one is pretty straightforward:

• Red - the module hasn't been touched
• Yellow - the module is in progress
• Green - the module is code complete.
  

And you'll end up with something like this:



Holy crap - there are very few modules that are complete, and very few that are untouched. That means that the team is wandering all over the featurescape almost randomly coding on different modules. This approach has all sorts of dangers:

• This makes it very hard to ever get a project done because no individual item ever is completed.
  
• This approach leads to the "throw it over the wall to testing at the end of a long development" method. Not a good thing. For example, a fundamental flaw in design / implementation could have happened months ago and propagated to the rest of the product. That could easily lead to orders of magnitude to fix all of those issues.

If all is going well, we would expect to see a very small part of the diagram showing up in yellow (in progress) with the rest of the modules being either red (untouched) or green (completed).