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The Mythical Man-Month Revisited
jpkunst writes "Ed Willis, over at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com, gives his varied reactions to Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man-Month, after 'having finally read it in its entirety'. '[...] simultaneously you can see just how much the field has changed since the original writing and just how much has stayed stubbornly the same.'"
Brooks put forth a lot of good ideas, some of which morphed and/or were independently discovered and some that were true then as they are today. For example, he says, "Build one to throw away." Amen to that.
Another concept he brought to light was originally Harlan Mills's, that of making the programming team like a surgical team. A surgeon, or chief programmer, has primary architectural, design, and implementation responsibility, but is assisted by a copilot, administrator, editor, two secretaries, and a program clerk.
While I've never seen such a team, I have witnessed pair programming that the XP (not Windows, eXtreme Programming) folks praise, and it works quite well. It may not be a full-fledged surgical team as Brooks would've liked, but the productivity of a pilot on the keyboard and a copilot following after every little mistake certainly improves productivity.
It is a very thin book but I have only skimmed through it. The name of the book basically comes from this idea...
If you were for example painting a big house or something it my take one man two months to complete. But if you had two men then it takes one month. The more people you add the faster the job it done. So we often talk about how many man months are needed to complete a job. But that are many tasks that cannot be made faster by adding more people. Brooks states that programming is one of those tasks. Adding too many people to the programming effort will only make it take longer because of interdependencies, communication and coordination required. The programmer and time are not fungible. We cannot simple expect to complete a project that takes 1 man 18 months with 18 men in 1 month. As you add more men the time improvements become less and less.
Right. My favorite way of helping "managers" see this is by rhetorically asking, "So, why can't nine women make a baby in just one month?"