Java Software Factories: Part 6 - Development Scalability
Great software engineers can improvise solutions for just about anything. Innovation comes naturally to them. They are often very fast at coding too.
Good developers are often asked to mentor weaker or less experienced developers. They guide their apprentice much the same way that craftmasters guide their apprentices.
The problem is that apprenticeship does not scale. There's a limit to the number of great developers that are also good at mentoring and how many junior developers they can train at the same time.
An alternative is to only hire experienced, innovative developers.
Even if you could hire dozens or hundreds of innovative software developers that can patch together solutions to each problem that is thown at them, the result will be chaos.
The problems will start once application integration starts.
The consistency of the Java Software Factories approach provides development scalability. You can have a dozen teams in a dozen locations, mainly consisting of less experienced mainstream developers guided by Software Factory architects, all developing consistent applications with the same approach and same architecture.
We will still need some clever, innovative software engineers. They can be thrown at the difficult problems. They can be the Java Software Factory architects.
PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software