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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Tue, 02 Aug 2005

Do you know your Bus Number?

The topic of a team's Bus Number (or Truck Number) has come up three times in the last two days, so I'm carting it out here.

Taken from Ship It! (page 115):

Raise Your Bus Number

Your bus number is the number of developers you'd have to lose to disable your project.

Whether they quit or get hit by the proverbial bus, losing this many people will derail your project. If you have a single superstar who keeps all the project details to themselves, you have a bus number of one, and that's a problem. If every member of your team can fill in for any other person, then you would have to lose your entire team for the project to be completely derailed. Ideally, you want your bus number to be equal to the number of your team members, but at the very least you should work to raise the number. If the loss of one or two key people can devastate your product, take steps to raise that number.

Tracer Bullet Development automatically raises your bus number. When team members from adjacent layers work together to define their shared interfaces, they are sharing knowledge about each layer's operations. This picture, shared between the two teams, makes it possible for your group's members to move between layers more easily. At a minimum, everyone has a basic understanding of what adjacent layers do and how they work.

If you've never considered your project's bus number, take a few minutes to survey your team. What's your bus number? What steps can you take to raise it?

You can read more about Bus Numbers and Truck Numbers at the famous C2 Wiki

Jared

posted at: 20:29 | path: | permanent link to this entry