Why Is Team Development Important?

Is it possible to be a lone ranger in the field of software development? Isn’t writing code akin to other forms of creative writing (poetry or an op-ed piece) that must intrinsically be a lonesome activity? In practice (as well as in the opinion of these authors), the answer is not exactly. Authoring code (like any other engineering discipline) gains stability and maturity when it is pursued as a team effort, where the instruments of peer review and critique help balance the negative effects of personal bias and accustomed (but irksome) habits.

An example is due. For the longest time, one of the authors of this book was in the habit of using a Java class to contain all the constants (public static final variables). These constants would then be used wherever they were needed using constructs like the following: