More Engineers on a project doesn’t mean faster results

It is a known fact that if you have a lot of engineers/developers working on a single project the time that it will take to finish the task it will actually be longer.

Today, while having breakfast on a hotel, I could actually see that theory in practice. While setting up a piece of furniture with coffee and mugs, etc, the glass under that table bursted (tempered glass) and it was a huge mess.

There was glass all over the place, on the table, on the ground, on the lady, and, as anyone would guess, everyone came to help.

The task was simple: take the lady to get some medical attention, clean up the glass, re-setup the table.

If you put it in perspective, we would need for the task, 3 to 4 people. Someone to take the lady for medical attention, 1 to 2 people to clean up the place and 1 person to re-setup the table. On this case there were twice as much.

What happened then was the following:

• Everyone was trying to do everything
• No-one actually did had a plan
• Other areas were unattended
• Clients didn’t know what was going on and every client was in shock (maybe not me).

If there was a proper direction and the people involved knew what needed to be done, then, the 15 minutes taken to clean up the glass, would probably take less and the reason is, because there was a direction and the proper number of resources, there was no interruption from one side to another.

This is what happens on a software development project. As a manager you need faster results and, for some reason, you added more people. Even with proper direction most likely one Engineer will step in another Engineer’s turf, blocking him to finish the task. Taking this in consideration, a task that could have taken 1 hour to finish, now takes 1 and a half because there is more resources in it than necessary.

Example, consider that you are building a feature. The feature, if done by one engineer will take 2 days. The normal tough in this case is let’s add another engineer in this task and then it will take 1 day because each engineer should be able to finish it sooner. What happen here is that most likely one engineer will need to wait for the other to finish his part, therefore, those 2 days assigned for the task now takes 2 and half.

Anyways, point is, before assigning more developers/engineers to a task, make sure that each one can take part of a task as a task itself. In the story told above, the glass was clean, the table was re-setup, the lady was taken care of, breakfast resumed naturally, it just took longer than expected.