One again: Communicate!

This blog post (found via Raganwald) reiterates what I've said previously: It's all about communication.

This is the single most important reason why projects succeed or fail.

This is also why I think The Mythical Man-Month is one of the most important books that any developer can read...even so many years after it's initial publication.

Seeing the "adding programmers to a late project makes it later" quote explained in detail is certainly interesting and worth reading, as is reading No Silver Bullet which also has some important points as well (and which I've even talked about previously, too).

But the single most import discussion in The Mythical Man-Month is about effective communication.

Fred Brooks recognized that maintaining effective communication is what separates successful projects from failures. The amazing (or distressing) thing is that he understood this well over thirty years ago. It sometimes seems like that message got lost while everyone focused on his discussion of complexity and the whole "adding programmers to a late project" that everyone loves to quote so much.

As developers, we have a habit of finding ways to shut out the world...which is certainly necessary sometimes to get the job done. But we have to be careful to not cut ourselves off so much that we're not keeping key people on the team out of the loop about our work. It's a delicate balance that has to be maintained, but it's important that everyone involved in a project has an idea of what's going on - whether you're a manager, architect, developer, or user.

To do otherwise is to invite failure.