We have 7 developers in a team and need to double our development pace in a short period of time (around one month). I know there is a common sense rule that if you hire more developers, you only lose in productivity for the first few months. The project is an e-commerce web service and has around 270K lines of code.My idea for now is to divide the project in two more or less independent sub-projects and let the new team work on the smaller of the two sub-projects, while the current team works on the main project. Namely, the new team will work on checkout functionality, which will eventually become an independent web service in order to decrease coupling. This way, the new team works on a projects with only 100K lines of code.My question is: will this approach help newbie developers to adapt easily to the new project? What are other ways to extend the development team rapidly without waiting two months until newbies start producing more software then bugs?=======UPDATEThis enterprise failed completely, but not for the reasons you guys mentioned. First of all, I was misinformed about the size and capability of the new team. I should have evaluated them myself. Second, hiring turned out to be a hard job at that site. At the site of the main office hiring was much more easy, but in the city of the second team there was apparently shortage of developers with the required qualification. As a result, instead of projected 1.5 months the job extended to about 4.5 months, and was cancelled in the middle of it by the top management.Another mistake I made (and was warned about it by Alex D) is that I was trying to sell refactoring to the top management. You never sell refactoring, only features.The startup turned out to be successful anyway. The refactoring that never happened turned into technical debt: the system became more monolithic and less maintainable, developer productivity gradually decreased. I am not in the team now, but I do hope they complete it in the nearest future. Otherwise, I wouldn't give a penny for the project's survival.
Will giving new recruits a separate subproject from experienced developers help the newbies ramp up more quickly?
productivity;agile;team