I have been on a project where the manager ignored Brooks' Law, and was well-funded enough to actually get away with it. He preferred to get lots (LOTS) of interns and first-time developers from top schools, presumably on the theory that they were smart and willing to work insane hours. But this team was also well-disciplined in writing tests and readable code, and did follow a lot of Agile processes. Pretty much every part of the codebase was accessible to every developer, and it was common to submit patches to other people's work.
So this was a good experiment to test the posted article's thesis; lots of good processes, Open-Source-like development style, giant team.
I wouldn't call the result a trainwreck, exactly, but neither do I ever want to experience that again.
It got to the point where some were openly calling for half the team to be fired; not due to incompetence but because we were digging ourselves deeper into refactoring debt every day. The ratio of "code written to work around misdesigns" versus "code that achieves something" approached 1:1, at least in my experience. At least two different frameworks sprouted up among the developers to work around each others' bugs.
So this was a good experiment to test the posted article's thesis; lots of good processes, Open-Source-like development style, giant team.
I wouldn't call the result a trainwreck, exactly, but neither do I ever want to experience that again.
It got to the point where some were openly calling for half the team to be fired; not due to incompetence but because we were digging ourselves deeper into refactoring debt every day. The ratio of "code written to work around misdesigns" versus "code that achieves something" approached 1:1, at least in my experience. At least two different frameworks sprouted up among the developers to work around each others' bugs.