[sublinear]

I think this is highly underrated.

The ideal is when a team's experience actually matches the project they're assigned. They need to be up to the task.

This requires management to be at least more experienced than the teams they manage and to make good hiring and placement decisions. This is not just number of years in the industry, but the average number of years spent at any single company. They need to have seen the long tail of maintenance in the development lifecycle on projects they were wholly responsible for.

[BackBlast]

Agreed. I've seen an org that essentially let the devs run the show for picking timelines, technologies, features. It was a disaster. Endless design by committee, no progress, too many abstractions, and on and on it went with developer created problems after being given free reign with only general direction. Of course, this is a management issue at the root, all problems are, aren't they? :)

Creating functional software engineering orgs is hard. Between dysfunctional management, lack of support from other business departments, or problems originating from the devs themselves.

It's pretty easy to feel when it's not working properly and know roughly where the problem lies. But solving it properly is hard stuff.