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]