Gang bang
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"), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in
orthogonality.
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 infinitesimal.
See also
firefighting,
Mongolian Hordes technique,
Conway's Law.
[
Jargon File]
