Much of what I do these days is serve as a buffer between the people who actually do work and the committees that think they are ensuring the work gets done. As such, when Ian Grigg posits Hypothesis 4.2, there is nothing I can add except my wholehearted agreement:

Simplicity is proportional to the inverse of the number of designers. Or is it that complexity is proportional to the square of the number of designers?

Sad but true, if you look at the classical best of breed protocols like SSH and PGP, they delivered their best work when one person designed them. Even SSL was mostly secure to begin with, and it was only the introduction of PKI with its committees, models, digital signature laws and accountants that sent it into orbit around Pluto.

…

…It should be clear by now that committees are totally out of the question. They are like whirlpools, great spiralling sinks of talent, so paddle as fast as possible in the other direction.

Actually, I do have one thing to add. This pre-supposes that the individuals doing the design work are qualified to do so.

I really miss trackbacks, it took me a while to spot this :)

On your interesting point: I think that success in design pre-supposes that individuals are qualified to do the work. There are issues with relying on that, however.

Firstly, what do you mean by “qualified” ? Is there a university degree? A “long history of similar work?” It is not clear to me that (in security) there is much that one can tie down here, as most people who we might agree as qualified have done lots of stuff … some good and some bad. So I guess what I am saying is that “qualified” implies success which implies qualified which … makes it circular?

Secondly, we have an economic argument. What happens if the individuals fail to achieve? What have we lost? Their time, the company’s time, etc. In comparison, if the committee fails, then we’ve lost all their time, and it’s generally more people for more time.

So “better” might come down to simply showing that the single designer has a better chance of succeeding, in shorter time, than a committee. In which case we are Pareto-better-off, as the single designer will always be cheaper on success *and* failure. (OK, that assumes that the successes are equal. Back to the drawing board…)