We always heard a small, sharp team of first-class people is better than a big team, but it is difficult to scale. What should we do when a big product need to be built?

The surgical team

The book suggest a surgical team like structure to reduce the communication cost. Only one member cutting away on the problem and other teammates give support to him.

Surgeon

• Chief programmer
• Define functional and performance specification
• Design, code and test program
• Write documentation
• Responsible for all codes

Copilot

• Able to do what ‘surgeon’ do
• Prevent ‘surgeon’ to make mistake
  • Discuss and evaluate idea and design with ‘surgeon’
  • Reseach alternative design strategies
• Discuss the functional interface with other teams
• Know all the code
• May write code, but he is not responsible for any part of the code

Administrator

• Handles money, people, space, and machines
• Unless the project has substantial legal, contractual, reporting or financial requirements, one administrator can serve two teams

Editor

• All documentation should be written by ‘surgeon’, no matter it is internal or external
• Editor criticize, rework surgeon’s manuscript
• Editor also provide reference, bibliography and having version control on documentation.

Secretaries

• One secretary for administrator, and one for Editor
• Handle project correspondence and non-product files

Program Clerk

• Maintaining all the technical records in a programming-product library
• Has responsibility for both machine-readable and human-readable files
• Make all programming resources public
• Relieves programmers of clerical chores, systematize and ensures proper performance of those oft-neglected chores

Toolsmith

• Ensure the basic service available
• Responsible for constructing, maintaining and upgrading special tools
• Construct specialized utilities, catalogued procedures and macro libraries

Tester

• Help design test case and prepare test data
• Plan testing sequence and set up the scaffolding required for component tests

Language Lawyer

• Expert on a specific Language
• Find a neat and efficient way to use the language to do difficult, obscure, or tricky things
• Need to do two or three days studies on good technique
• One ‘language lawyer’ can serve two or three surgeons

How it works

• Only ‘surgeon’ and ‘copilot’ take care the design, which guarantee conceptual integrity of the work
• There are no differences of interest, as surgeon make the final decision

Communication Pattern

• Administrator and editor communicate with ‘surgeon’ directly
• Surgeon have close communicate with Copilot
• Programming clerk, toolsmith, tester and language lawyer communicate with surgeon and copilot

Scaling up

• Scale with team as unit
• For a 200 people project, only need to coordinating 20 minds of surgeons.