> Whilst I agree with the rest of your post - I think the correct tools are > absolutely essential in an effecient development team.
I think you missed the point of my post. Good tools do provide a benefit (my teams typically are outfitted with Together...which is much more powerful in it's latest incarnation than Idea/J)....but the difference in overall team productivity in meeting objectives with experienced developers (as opposed to jr/intermediates) far outweighs the differential provided by the tools. > How long did that compile take? Wasted time. Who cares how long a compile takes, or if you have to do it a few times. In the larger scheme of things, over a longer lifecycle of a complex project, there are many other factors that totally overshadow any such "wasted time" you refer to. Besides, the compile time issue (and many others) are easily mitigated by faster hardware, which is dirt cheap compared to good people (or even training required to used bloated IDE-like tools). Your comment labels you as a techno-tunnel-visionary. <grins> The issue is that many PHM's believe that tools are the magic bullet. They are not and likely never will be. Good people are the "magic bullet"....but that's not so much magic as good leadership, motivation, etc. Sure....tools can help. They might make a good developer 10% or even 50% faster. Kind of pales when you consider that my teams outperform the average by an order of magnitude (ie. 10 to 1....1000%). Focusing on the tools is not the way to get increased productivity. Focusing on your people is. This also requires management (how I HATE that word) that is clued in, understands the development process (which is more craftsmanship than engineering for most business application/system development), cares about their people, will fight for them, can engender respect, will "protect" the team from unproductive influences, and will not accept "death-march" projects. Unfortunately, such enlightened leadership tends to be rare in this industry. That is not to say that after you focus on getting good people (attracting/hiring, training, mentoring, eliminating the consistent poor performers, etc.), that you shouldn't give your excellent team excellent tools (assuming they want them, you can afford them, you have the luxury of training time, etc). Of course you should. But you know....give me good people any day....the tools are a nice to have...not mandatory for high productivity and meeting project goals. Then again, YMMV. I'll stick with my experiences having built hyper- performance teams from scratch many times over. Andrzej Jan Taramina Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions http://www.chaeron.com =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff EJB-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
