Emory Christer

Design by committee Emory Christer

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Design by committee is a term referring to a style of design and its resultant output when a group of entities comes together to produce something (often the design of technological systems or standards), particularly in the presence of poor leadership. The defining characteristics of "design by committee" are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision. The term is especially common in technical parlance, and it legitimizes the need and general acceptance of a unique systems architect. Often, when software is designed by a committee, the original motivation, specifications and technical criteria take a backseat and poor choices may be made merely to appease the egos of several individual committee members. Such products and standards end up doing too many things or having parts that fit together poorly (because the entities who produced those parts were unaware of each other's requirements for a good fit). One such example was the decision for an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cell size of 53 bytes.