gang bang

n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to
wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there
have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port
mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers ), and large numbers of loosely-coupled
programmers operating in bazaar mode can do very useful work when they're
not on a deadline, most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet
unrealistic deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of
code entirely lacking in orthogonal ity. When market-driven managers make a
list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to
implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even
functional) design goes to epsilon. See also firefighting , Mongolian Hordes
technique , Conway's Law.

