[crocal]

The point seems missed to me. Like any serious collaborative undertaking (movies, buildings, complex systems development, scientific collaborations, etc), successful software needs a unique person to carry the vision of what is the expected result and do what needs to be done to achieve this result, including organizing the works. Call him or her a director, an architect, a chief scientist, a hero… He/she will always be needed.

It’s interesting to note that these people can also become the doom of the project. This is why there is no single easy recipe for picking the right person.

[jffhn]

Reminds me of the Surgical Team from The Mythical Man-Month, and of an interview of I think one of the authors of the agile manifesto, talking about IBM internal experiments concluding that it was the most effective organisation.

I've been working in such teams, the surgeon was typically one of the early developpers, that did (and knew) most of the code, but as the system grew sub-surgeons started to emerge for new or reworked parts.