Recently there have been a couple of bigger development/programming issues that have needed to get resolved where time was of the essence, and some kind of “short cut” was needed. Bring in the “Hive Mind”.
In Agile, there is Scrum, and XP .. pair programming. But what if you bring in 5-6 developers, put code up on the screen and say “help me”. The informal results I have seen are astounding.
What can result is in 10-15 minutes you have a problem solved, and everyone aware of the issue or code surrounding the issue.
Now, not to say you want to do this for every situation, but in some cases it can work wonders. I’d also want to note that the results I have seen could be unique – as always, your mileage may vary.
But the Hive Mind really does bring to light the power of many heads working together to collaborate and come up with a solution quickly. Very cool.
As usual though – pretty much common sense – more open communication and information sharing leads to a better result.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 