Codermetrics

Timeout for an Example: No Such Thing As a Perfect Team

Is there such a thing as a perfect team? Unless your definition of “perfect” is pretty loose, you would have to say no. In sports we know there are no perfect teams or even perfect seasons. The 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan had the best record ever in professional basketball, winning seventy-two games in the regular season, but they still lost ten times. Even the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only American pro football team to go through an entire season undefeated and win the Super Bowl, had multiple flaws and four of its seventeen wins were by less than four points.

The best software teams I ever worked on definitely weren’t perfect. Our software wasn’t perfect, that’s for sure. But I remember these teams fondly and I think of them as good, maybe even great, because we accomplished the goals that were put before us and that we set for ourselves. We delivered software that impressed and sometimes delighted our users. We improved over time, and we had fun along the way.

The closest I ever saw a software team get to perfect was, ironically, a team that worked on a product that never shipped. After a year of development, with a product already in beta and one month shy of the ship date, the project was cancelled for business reasons (the company had to cut back in areas because overall profits were declining). I was a member of the team, so I’m biased, but I believe the software was revolutionary and would have been a ...