A few weeks ago I tried out ‘elance.com’. Yes, I could design an own logo, yes, I could invest many many hours, but why not do what I can do best, earn more money per hour concentrating on something else and hire someone experienced instead? The result is the new logo you see at the top and the new design (the latter being my own work, further adapting the wordpress ‘Pixel’ theme).
What did I have learned from this? It’s a great way to get your own thoughts straight. You have to define the project and all steps. It’s a great way to put your own thoughts into action and keep being motivated until the project is finished – because there is (hopefully) a motivated worker at the other end I already have plans for new projects, this time letting someone do some programming for my new database project.

Fantômas (French pronunciation: [fɑ̃tomas]) is a fictional character created by French writers Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914).

One of the most popular characters in the history of French crime fiction, Fantômas was created in 1911 and appeared in a total of 32 volumes written by the two collaborators, then a subsequent 11 volumes written by Allain alone after Souvestre’s death. The character was also the basis of various film, television, and comic book adaptations. In the history of crime fiction, he represents a transition from Gothic novel villains of the 19th century to modern-day serial killers.

The books and movies that came out in quick succession anticipate current production methods of Hollywood, in two respects:[1] First, the authors distributed the writing among themselves; their “working method was to draw up the general plot between them and then go off and write alternate chapters independently of each other, meeting up to tie the two halves of the story together in the final chapter.” This approach allowed the authors to produce almost one novel per month. Second, the movie rights to the books were immediately snapped up. Such a system ensured that the film studio could produce sequels reliably.

The novels were spoken at the same time in different rooms and recorded on wax cylinders which then were evaluated by two groups of stenographers. Only with this method it was possible to fulfill the quota of one book each month. In preliminary talks both Souvestre and Allain allotted the chapters that had to be written. Because of the time pressure both authors usually did not read the other author’s chapters and sometimes even didn’t proofread their own works.”

wikipedia
wikipedia (emphasis added)

Modern software production is not much different. It is interesting to learn that source version control systems / project management systems have a long history, way before computers even existed.