Mythical Man Month Essay

In chapter three of Mythical Man Month, the concept of the surgical team for program seems a little strange and hard to put into practical application for me.  Logically it makes sense to maintain conceptual integrity across all components of the program by having one person, like the surgeon, be in charge of the design and coding.  Also, from our other readings, I know that, realistically speaking, coding takes up only one sixth of the amount of time spent on the project.  I found it difficult, however, to see how one person can be responsible for all of the code.  Even with the copilot to be able to discuss ideas with, this seems to be too much for one person.  In a ten person team, it seems unrealistic that one person alone should be doing all the coding of that project, or that part of the project.

It seems that while the roles of the other members of the team are responsible for essential work to the project, but I feel that too much is being placed upon the surgeon.  Even without having to deal with most of the details regarding money, people, space, and everything else related since he has an administrator to do that and even though he does not have to generate documentation since the editor does that, he still programs, codes, tests, and writes documentations and could easily be overwhelmed.  One specific issue I find with this setup is that it seems that the surgeon is doing most of the testing.  I find that often, the person writing the code has a blind spot in their code.  There is a special case that they forgot about in coding and therefore, forgot about in testing.  While they should be testing for basic functionality, and all the special casing they can, I think there should be an additional person responsible for this as well.