Communication is essential
We are human beings. What makes us the intelligent creatures of the earth is our ability to not just communicate, but to communicate complex thoughts and ideas. It comes naturally to us to want to communicate and we learn to communicate at a very young age.
So why is it that some of the biggest problems we as people have in this world is driven by poor communication? We're in the information age of e-mail, blackberries, and text messaging, but we're still crappy communicators.
When you're in an environment where the size of your development team is in constant flux, and is driving towards growth; where the code you are working on is the same code being worked by others on a different tangent; where the decisions you make are taken by others to be policy... why when you're in this environment would you NOT focus on effective communication?
Disparate teams of developers, whether working in a different location, or one row of cubes over, who are working on common code sets, or common data stores, need to be pushing their designs out to the other teams early on in the process to ensure all the other teams are in sync. This just makes good sense. So why is this communication so lacking? Is it the people involved? Is there some underlying fear of someone really scrutinizing and criticizing your work? A fear that maybe if someone finds something that is a show stopper that you'd have to stop and start all over again? I would see these as reasons to why you WOULD communicate.
So I ask... why is this such a big problem? Someone please explain this to me.