Drop and Code Me Twenty!

"What? You want me to tell you what to do, like some big boss?" Jim McCarthy, software management guru, Microsoft alum, and master-sergeant at the McCarthy TeamworX Software Development BootCamp, stares coolly at October's batch of inductees.

It's a Sunday evening, less than an hour into the five-day course, and the class is floundering. They've come a considerable distance six recruits from a Minneapolis medical software firm, two from a Connecticut business software company, and one Bay Area games programmer and paid $5,000 apiece to learn to do what few in this industry can do consistently: ship quality software on time.

But everything about the camp seems to be jarringly at odds with the high-tech, high-stakes, high-intensity world of software -- starting with the rustic setting, a Lutheran retreat center just east of Seattle. There are no computers. No T1 lines. Not even overhead presentations. Worst of all, when the students finally learn what they'll be doing for the next five days -- an unusual software project too proprietary to reveal here -- the assignment seems neither anything they know how to do nor what they signed up for.

"Could we get some more detail?" pleads Chris Holton, a blond, 28-year-old marketing director from Minneapolis. "I'm confused," confesses Sean Vikoren, a 32-year-old games programmer, his angular face showing both skepticism and irritation. "It seems to me that you've set us up, then cruelly chucked us into the abyss."

It is a cruel moment, one of several guaranteed at every TeamworX BootCamp. Tonight's class, for example, has just been weaned from management dependency: the campers will not be "rescued" or told what to do. Over the next five days inductees will unlearn much of what they've been taught about developing software. "You can't have great software without a great team," McCarthy says. "And most software teams behave like dysfunctional families."

Teaching teams how to function is McCarthy's main mission. A bearded, weary-looking 45-year-old who favors cowboy boots and loud shirts, he began writing software in 1976. He spent five years at Microsoft where he worked on various hot products and, along the way, found the secret that lets development teams produce killer software, on time, without killing the team members.

Great teams, it turns out, begin with a shared vision -- a unified, clearly articulated belief about the software they're creating. Great teams have, and are driven by, genuine passion -- a collective regard for the project as art, not "work," and a personal sense of responsibility for its completion. Moreover, great teams are not hierarchical or autocratic; they tap each member's creative potential.

Great teams are also absurdly rare -- made scarce by corporate cultures that rely on top-down management, set totally unrealistic production schedules, and solve problems simply by working very smart people for very long hours. "When people say 'hard work,' what they really mean is using individual heroics to compensate for the inefficiencies of the system," says McCarthy. "It sucks. But that's how most of us make software."

McCarthy's ideas -- presented first in lectures and, last year, in a book, "The Dynamics of Software Development," published by Microsoft Press -- have earned him a devoted following among desperate program managers. In early 1996, he, his wife, Michele Frame, his son Kevin, and five other former Microsofties -- John Rae-Grant, Jeff and Inga Beehler, Steve Skrzyniarz, and Laura Petersen -- created the TeamworX BootCamp, a living lesson. But the lessons aren't painless. Before they can enter the brave new world, students first must break from the old by plunging or being plunged into a temporary abyss of uncertainty, anxiety, and chaos.

"This is where the last group completely broke down," says McCarthy, watching the class tackle a cooperative exercise on the center's vast lawn. It's Tuesday, 2 p.m., and while the students exhibit no obvious mental trauma, they are still a bit wild-eyed. They've spent the last 40 hours in a state of fluctuating mania: organizing, arguing, deciding, and, above all, making lists: lists of optional team "visions," lists of elements within those visions, lists of techniques for creating those elements, and, finally, a list simply entitled "How to get fucking started."

Yet coherence is emerging. The diverse outfit is functioning as a single unit. Cooperation is constant. Communication styles have assumed important new dimensions. Excuses, for instance, have dwindled. Boot-campers are expected to explain how they can get something done, not why they can't. The instructors initially enforce the "no bullshit" policy, but the students quickly embrace it -- none more aggressively than the formerly skeptical Vikoren.