Do Surgical Teams exist?

Question

Has anybody been in or has seen a kind of "Surgical Team" as described in The Mythical Man Month? Have you heard of somebody actually implementing "Mill's Proposal"?

There is a lot of detail about the various roles in the book itself, but for those who haven't read the book, I found a website and a blog post which give a good summary. I've quoted the roles from the website below:

The Surgical Team

• The surgeon is the chief programmer and the el-presidente of the whole team. He produces all the specifications, codes the entire system the team is responsible for, tests it, and drafts its supporting documentation.

• The copilot is the surgeon’s assistant. His main purpose is to share in the thinking about design issues – to serve as a sounding board, as it were. The copilot represents the team in meetings with other teams. He knows the code intimately, and serves as insurance in case of disaster to the surgeon.

• The toolsmith supports the surgeon and builds specialized utilities and tools as may be required by his surgeon. Each team has its dedicated toolsmith in addition to any central services provided by the rest of the project infrastructure. The tester is responsible for maintaining test cases for testing the surgeon’s work as he writes it. He is both an adversary who devises test cases to measure against the formal specs and devises test data to be used in debugging.

• The language lawyer, which can serve several surgeons, I a widely consulted specialist who delights in the mastery of the intricacies of the programming languages and the operating systems upon which the software must perform.

• The administrator handles money, people, space, and machines. The surgeon is the ultimate boss, with the last word on all these issues, but the day to day management of the issues and interfacing with the administrative machinery of the project is the role of a professional administrator. One administrator may serve more than one team.

• The editor edits and revises the documentation as drafted or dictated by the surgeon and oversees the mechanics of its production.

• The program clerk, trained as a secretary, is responsible for maintaining all the machine-readable and human-readable technical records generated by the team. All the filing and indexing is the responsibility of the program clerk.

• The secretaries handle the project correspondence and non-project files.

Answer 1

We did use the surgical team approach of Brooks' at a startup we set up about 10 years ago. We were five people at the company plus a few others at the uni lab supporting us. The experience was technically great, but it didn't last long for business reasons. :-)