| gag
= G =
Gang of Four
gang bang n.
The use of large numbers of loosely coupled
programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a
product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang
bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in
Steven Levy's "Hackers"), and large numbers of loosely-coupled
programmers operating in bazaar mode can do very useful work
when they're not on a deadline, most are perpetrated by large
companies trying to meet unrealistic deadlines; the inevitable
result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in
orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all
the features the competition has and assign one programmer to
implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even
functional) design goes to epsilon. See also firefighting,
Mongolian Hordes technique, Conway's Law.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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