Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
fi fty thousand instructions. Mills attempted to complete the project
himself (using a prototype surgical team) in only six months. The project
eventually required about six man-years of effort to complete, and was
considered a moderate success. The second experiment mentioned by
Aron at the Rome conference turned out to be the famous
New York
Times
project, which established the reputation of the CPT approach
when it was publicized by F. Terry Baker in 1971. In both versions of
the CPT approach, a single, expert programmer was responsible for all
major design and implementation decisions involved with system devel-
opment. The chief programmer (or surgeon) defi ned the program speci-
fi cations, designed the program, coded it, tested it, and wrote the
documentation. The chief was assisted in their tasks by an operating
team of support staff. Their immediate assistant (or copilot) was only
slightly less expert than the chief programmer. The copilot was the chief
programmer's mirror and alter ego, serving not only as an emergency
backup or stand-in but also as an adviser, discussant, and evaluator.
Although the assistant knew the program code intimately and may even
have written some of it, it was the chief programmer who was ultimately
responsible for it.
Other members of the Brooks's surgical team included an administra-
tor, who handled schedules, money, personnel issues, and hardware
resources; an editor, who provided the fi nishing touches to the chief
programmer's documentation; two secretaries, who dealt with corre-
spondence and fi ling; a program clerk, who maintained all the technical
records for the project; a “toolsmith,” who built, constructed, and main-
tained the interactive tools used by the rest of the team for programming,
debugging, and testing; a tester, who served as the chief programmer's
adversary and assistant, developed test plans to challenge the integrity
of the program design, and devised test data for day-to-day debugging;
and fi nally, the “language lawyer,” who delighted in the mastery of the
intricacies of a programming language. The language lawyer, unlike the
chief programmer, was not involved in big-picture issues or system
design; the lawyer's responsibility was fi nding “neat and effi cient
ways to use the language to do diffi cult, obscure, or tricky things.”
Language lawyers were usually called in only for special, short-term
assignments.
40
The advantage to the CPT approach, according to Mills and Brooks,
was that it dramatically simplifi ed communications between team
members. Whereas a large, hierarchical organization of X number of
employees could require as many as (X
2
- X)/2 independent paths of
