[crdoconnor]

"Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?"

Yep. The benefit is efficiency. However, modern SCRUM advocates simply advocate grinding away at stories.

"What was the second system effect about?"

The glittering new rewrite of an existing system is usually overengineered and worse. Seen it several times.

[vram22]

Interesting about the 2nd point, thanks. Might make for interesting reading if there are any articles about that. Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.

[vram22]

>Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.

And at least in one case, it was: in a C database middleware product that I worked on, as the team leader. It did work earlier but had big issues of bugs, slowness, memory leaks, and maintainability. There were many reasons for that, including complete freshers put to work in it (a mistake). After me and a small new team took over, we improved it a lot and fixed all those issues. It went on to become a much more successful product, deployed somewhat widely within the company, for client projects ...