--- title: "The Bus Factor - Why your ‘best’ developer is your biggest problem" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-bus-factor-why-your-best-developer-is-your-biggest-probl.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-bus-factor-why-your-best-developer-is-your-biggest-probl.html" published: "2010-05-17T11:51:48+00:00" updated: "2011-04-04T22:42:09.827000+00:00" tags: ["Anti Patterns", "Learning Phase", "Shu"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "How to spot a bus factor of one in your team and reduce it with standups, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, including the team leader as one." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # The Bus Factor - Why your ‘best’ developer is your biggest problem From [wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor), a “Bus Factor” is: > an irreverent measurement of **concentration of information in a single person, or very few people.** The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated, as by getting hit by a bus, to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed From my personal experience, I'd say that more than 70% of projects suffer from a bus factor of 1. It only takes one specific person in those teams to not be able to be there for the project to halt or slowly die in painful agony as people try to makeup for lost knowledge. ### How do you recognize the bus factor? in your mind, go through each person in your team and ask yourself if the project could go on pretty much as usual if they were fired tomorrow. (fired is important because people who leave in good terms can still play ball and get you through tough stuff they worked on through phone conversations). If you say “no” or even hesitate about the answer, you’ve found the bus factor in your team. ### How do you get rid of the bus factor? Most of the collaboration techniques you’ll find in many agile methodologies like XP try to solve the idea of the bus factor, but you don’t have to be _agile_ to use those techniques. - [Use daily standups](https://www.5whys.com/articles/daily-standup-meetings-introduction-and-5-useful-tips.html) to share critical information - program in pairs every once in a while, or at least on key components of the system - [do code reviews](https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-4-start-doing-code-reviews-seriously.html) on every piece of code that gets checked in - do weekly half hour or one hour presentations by team members about interesting stuff they did this week - Ask the _bus factor carrier_ to teach someone else from the team to do their work and vice versa. Tell them that next week they _will_ be working alone on that material so they should get ready for that by working together on it. ### The biggest bus factor is you As a team leader, you might just be the biggest bus factor carrier of them all. What happens if you get fired tomorrow? can the team go on without you? Your biggest challenge as a team lead, over a long period of time would be to make yourself dispensable – to make the team mature enough to continue on day to day things without needing you. Removing yourself as a bottleneck is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your team. ## Read next - [My team keeps breaking their promises. What can I do?](https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.html): How a team leader can teach a team the language of commitment, spotting words like I'll try, setting end dates and flagging slips before deadlines pass. - [Two Techniques to Avoid the Bus Factor In your Teams: Push and Pull](https://www.5whys.com/articles/two-techniques-to-avoid-the-bus-factor-in-your-teams-push-an.html): How push based and pull based learning help a team remove bus factors, told through an architect who fixed a search server without learning anything. - [4 ways to discover a stuck team member, and what you can do about it](https://www.5whys.com/articles/4-ways-to-discover-a-stuck-team-member-and-what-you-can-do-a.html): Roy Osherove recalls being fired as a stuck developer and shows how standups, code reviews, test reviews and pairing help a lead spot and unblock people. ## Topic - [Learning Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/learning-mode) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/