The truck number problem

Truck number - or truck count - is the number of team members that would need to be hit by a truck to kill the project. It's a concept very dear to the Agile community, that improves this track number by using, among other, the pair programming technique.

For ages that I make use of the concept, not always from a fully formalized perspective, but assuring high track count numbers for the projects where I was involved.

So, if pair programming isn't compatible with your organizational culture, my advise to get higher scores in track count is:

• Avoid the dependency of layer and core modules to a single member.

Often we depend too much on one member. The problem of track count isn't always definitive. The truck count may be exposed when the guy that build the data tier went to holidays and some urgent bug is discovered.

Please note, I'm not saying team members shouldn't have some specialization, I thing they should. But keep in mind that the rest of the team should have the capability to maintain the application, and to assume control over a truck kill. And for that, the answer is simple to identify and harder to implement: communication...