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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."
In other words: they had an "embarrassingly parallel" problem and did the obviously right thing.
In addition, the article notes that the company was "a bit spoiled" by being in a position to hire from a large pool of MIT students, many of whom they knew personally. I like the subtle understatement here.
Not only did they put the target practically in front of the gun (by having an embarrassingly parallel problem), they also employed an embarrassingly high-calibre gun (i.e. hand-picked MIT students). Scoring has therefore been high. Surprise!
This experiment didn't do anything at all to bust the mythical man-month. Who came up with that title anyway? Must have been some slashdot editor ...
The real issue here, and one that is not addressed, is the quality of code. What the MMM addressed, IMHO, was adding developers to a project with defined metrics and ending up with code that met those metrics and integrated well with a larger code base. The reason that adding people did not work was the overhead needed to communicate between the develpers, which is 2^n proposition
As such, until the code is proven in service one cannot really say if the experiment worked. If the code is just going to have to be re-factored, or interfaces rewritten, then nothing was done other spending money to achieve a minimal product to meet a deadline. This is important, but does not prove or disprove anything.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Someone hand that guy a modpoint or two, because adding manpower to a late project can have beneficial effects. If, and only if, it is done sensibly.
Hire someone who makes sure the programmers have all the pizza and egg rolls they need so they ain't going to be distracted by having to call the pizza place for one. You all know how much time is killed with you get interrupted by something important. Like, say, a rumbling stomach. It takes ages to get back into the code afterwards.
But more sensibly, fire all the paper pushers and hire project managers worth their salt. And I don't mean "idiots that can set arbitrary milestones". We got plenty of those. A good project manager makes or breaks the project. What I need from a project manager is:
1) Making sure I have the hardware and software I need. Not "the company thinks I need". The ones I need.
2) Making sure external sources keep their deadlines or route around those bottlenecks. Know what makes most of my software late? That I finish my modules only to hear "uh... testing can't commence, we're waiting on something from X." A good PM knows that BEFORE it happens and tells you to drop that module and work on this one instead, because the guys at Y are done and we could start testing that part instead.
3) Most important: SHIELD ME FROM POINTLESS MEETINGS and go there for me. And there, his answers are "no". "Can't do that". And "has to be done on your end". I.e. the crap I usually get to hear in those meetings.
If necessary, hire more PMs. Not more programmers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not as old as you (in terms of Slashdot readership), but I've been here quite some time as well.
I think that, as readers left this site, editors slashed into the content quality and try the quantity approach. I used to be able to read the site daily and have time to post replies here and there. Now, I have it set in an RSS reader because the volume is much larger to the point that if I miss a day, 20 to 30 stories fly by.
It's not that there are more things to report now than 10 years ago, it's all these crappy filler stories, blog posts about nothing interesting, jokes and whatnot that make this site less and less relevant.
Additionally, while Slashdot used to be where the breaking news was happening, I can now find interesting and important stories up to THREE days later on this site than on digg, for example.
Me and some other people have submitted, days ago, important stories (in our opinion) about a FOSS company that is suing the Quebec government for the right to bid on contracts that went directly to Microsoft. This is being heard by the supreme court right now. The supreme court! And it's not even making slashdot!
It's not too late, but the editors really have to try and voluntarily lose a few percent point of page views in order to bring back quality and, more importantly, fellowship of readers.
If you think stories shows up on Digg before /., you should check out Reddit (especially the various tech subreddits). That's where you find the stories 4 days before they show up on Digg.
Nowadays, I mostly come to /. for the discussions. I will admit that the quality of discourse might have sagged a bit since its heyday, but on a whole I still find genuinely stimulating articles and commentary often enough to be a regular reader after all these years.