Design Ch. 6

In Chapter 6, Brooks talks about collaboration. Design was originally done by individuals, but today, it is done by groups of teams that may not even live in the same country. This shift was driven by two forces: the advance in telecommunications, and the need to design and sell products quickly. There are a few drawbacks to collaboration, such as cost, learning, communication and control. It is more expensive to partition a project, rather then have it be designed in a single piece. The more people that work on the project, the more people that need to be taught the necessary information to successfully design it. Communication can also be difficult, and this difficulty can lead to errors in scope or design. Control can also be difficult to designate. If a designer is not careful, a change he or she makes can be detrimental to another designer.