Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.
Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Peopleware
Principles, patterns, and practices are important, but it's the people who make them work. As Alistair Cockburn says: "Process and technology are a second-order effect on the outcome of a project. The first-order effect is the people."[1]
[1] Private communication
We cannot manage teams of programmers as if they were systems made up of components driven by a process. To use Alistair Cockburn's phrase, people are not "plug-replaceable programming units." If our projects are to succeed, we are going to have to build collaborative and self-organizing teams.
Those companies that encourage the formation of such teams will have a huge competitive advantage over those that hold the view that a software development organization is nothing more than a pile of twisty little people all alike. A gelled software team is the most powerful software development force there is.
