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"Mythical Man-Month" Supposedly Busted By MIT Startup
An anonymous reader writes "We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done and quadrupling its productivity."
If you RTFA, they don't really address Brook's point. They all worked on small projects. Where the mythical man-month applies is in the combined effort on a large, sufficiently complex project. The real breakdown comes in the collaboration and communication.
Besides, in the real engineering world, nobody is going to tolerate the work conditions they describe. The pay better be 10x what I earn now to pack me in a room with sweaty, overweight 40-somethings.
It's a cute college experiment and nothing more.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
And they deliberately attacked the problem noted in TMMM - that of communication and ramp-up - by seating everyone in the same room(s). And yes, working on independent problems. And those problems were not already late, in that the schedule had not yet started (TMMM is about adding people to an existing, complex project that is already running and having the communications, ramp-up, skills transfer and other sundry distractions causing an increase in work required that is greater than the increase in available effort).
Stupid, wrong, inflammatory and deliberately misleading headline, and summary, perfect for /. ! Go editors go!