Have the 1990´s changed the “software surgical team”?

Have the 1990´s changed the “software surgical team”? Frederick Brooks proposed the idea of the “software surgical team”; a team organized to quickly respond to the dynamic environment of software development. The software surgical team was also scaleable to large development efforts, making it an organizational concept for any sized software effort. Software development in the 1990´s is different from the IBM 360 era; the 1990´s are characterized by powerful software engineering environments, advanced workstations, and more rigorous processes. Does the software surgical team concept still apply? The results are surprising! We´ll look at our experiences from one of the major military software development efforts of the 1990´s