The lone monkey effect: what is it called?

Question

Project management

There is such an effect in the world: when very few people develop a large and sprawling system, then their efficiency sags non-linearly.
1) They have to keep too many areas in their heads at once, which causes them to overload.
2) So there are so few people, but there are many tasks - there is a temptation to speed things up at the expense of quality. And the project begins to sag under the weight of crutches. 3) Finally, the cross-pollination
mechanism does not turn on , when developers regularly stumble upon bugs of their colleagues and clear them before they go to the user. I have to ask: does this effect have a special name?

Answer 1

There is a perfectly parallel conveyor, for example, unloading bricks by 5 workers. The dismissal of 1 worker will lead to a decrease in efficiency by 20%
. There is a perfectly non-parallel conveyor, for example, one kneads clay (not in that sense), another sculpts a cup, the third paints and one cannot replace the other. Dismissing anyone will lead to a decrease in efficiency by 100% and a stop in production.
There are mixed conveyors. when a coder can be a designer, but it sucks.

sags non-linearly

And why should it sag linearly? See above.

speed things up with quality.

one cannot perform other people's duties, it is obvious that the quality is falling. If it could, then the quality would not fall and there would be no drop in efficiency at all, not linear, not 100%

cross pollination

Have you been with a girl for a long time?

I have to ask: does this effect have a special name?

Obviously not. There is an impossibility for one to fulfill the duties of others that are unusual for him when performing certain cycles of work.

Answer 2

If the project does not meet the deadlines, it means:
a) It is necessary to cut the functionality that was planned;
b) The work was poorly planned, the task was not split enough, and it is better to get together again and reschedule.
--
PS: You can read about SCRUM, there you will see that small teams can be effective if they do not take on too much in a unit of time.

Answer 3

I don't know what the effect is called. I would call "shit management", to be honest.
At first I began to answer what and how to do, but then I paid attention to: "speed up the matter at the expense of quality" .
Shot yourself in the foot, and then ask how to treat.
By the way, I would not be surprised if in such a situation people start to quit or burn out. Therefore, be careful
. Of course, there are different situations, but there is a theory that you can’t do it quickly, cheaply, awesomely - at the same time.

Answer 4

I've only heard of the opposite - Brooks' Law:
"If a project doesn't meet the deadline, then adding labor will delay it even further." There is such an old book "The Mythical Man-Month", I highly recommend it.

Answer 5

The problem is not the number of people.
The main thing when writing software is managing complexity. The larger the program, the more complex it becomes, but complexity can be dealt with. There are many methods - you can hide the complexity behind the API, you can divide it into independent modules, do refactoring, deal with side effects, and so on.
Simply put, you have shitty code.

Answer 6

The question is not clear. The combination of the words "quality" and "crutches" seems strange to me. Personally, I mean by the word "quality" just the absence of crutches, namely, the well-thought-out architecture of the program and high-quality project management, which are precisely aimed at ensuring that there are no crutches. Maybe you wanted to write "speed things up due to the number of [people]"?