The Black Team - A Parable of Group Effectiveness

JGWeissman

Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components.

It didn't turn out that way.

The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.

Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team."

From The Black Team. (Hat tip to Adam "ata" Atlas and Mike Blume.)

Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components.

It didn't turn out that way.

The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.

Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team."

From The Black Team. (Hat tip to Adam "ata" Atlas and Mike Blume.)

I think the next paragraph is the most important:

Things soon began to get a little crazy. Team members began to affect loud maniacal laughter whenever they discovered software defects. Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code. And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture. The crazier things got, the more effective the team became.

This makes it sound more like a cult rather than a group of rational people working together. Reminds me of this and similar posts. So instead of "A Parable of Group Effectiveness," it's more like, "A Parable of Smart People Getting Sucked Into a Feedback Loop Causing Them to Confuse Their Sense of Group Identity With the Terminal Values of Their Employer."

"...With the Terminal Values of Their Employer"

(blink)

Of what employer are you presuming quality code is a terminal value?

EDIT: Or, if I've misunderstood you... what employer terminal values are you presuming, here?

7ArisKatsaris15y

Are you saying that rational people are not supposed to have fun?

56ata15y

...they "grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code", for god's sake. This is just a group of people who decided to have fun with their identities, go about their jobs in a bit more theatrical a manner than usual, and make people's days more surreal, and managed to get their work done more effectively and more enjoyably in the process. (Rational doesn't mean boring.) I'm sort of used to random things in nearby memespace regions being accused of being cults, but this doesn't even seem to have the surface similarities that are usually brought up to support those accusations.

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The Black Team - A Parable of Group Effectiveness

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