Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, Second Edition

2. Individuals

That it is people who design software is terribly obvious ... and ignored. Weinberg’s discussion of people written in 1969 was followed by a stunning silence that lasted 15 years. The silence was finally broken by DeMarco and Lister’s Peopleware (1999). Another silence followed that book. We shouldn’t have to wait another 15 years before learning more about how people’s characteristics affect software development.

This chapter discusses people’s general “funkiness,” their failure modes, their success modes, and their general mode of operation, in the following sections:

“Them’s Funky People” discusses how different and unpredictable people are. A theme is that although general rules of operation may apply to this human device, ...