Release It!

Summary

Statistics guarantee that the majority of programmers have never worked on really large, mission-critical software. First, salary surveys consistently show that most programmers have less than ten years of experience. Once they reach that ten-year mark, many programmers move into management or just out of programming. Second, the histogram of project sizes is heavily weighted toward the smaller end of the scale. So, take a young population with relatively few opportunities to work on giant projects, and it’s no surprise that experience at that level is hard to find.

Without that experience, programmers are likely to re-create many of the capacity killers discussed in this section, either through ignorance or misguided intentions. These ...