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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 ...
How did this kind of crap show up on Slashdot?
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
One thing I hear a lot from programmers, particularly programmers unhappy with their Pointy Haired-Bosses, is, "I don't need to be managed as much as my bosses think I do!", and then pointing to a place like Google- which has one of the lowest managers-per-programmer ratios in the industry yet still produces amazing products- as an example.
The thing is, though, Google gets away with this because they hire the best of the best, and the best of the best can manage themselves pretty well. Most programmers are nowhere near as talented as the ones working at Google, they're the ones who need to be supervised. Managers are for programmers who write code that ends up on The Daily WTF, which is many of them.
I suspect that's what's going on here. Of course a bunch of MIT students can just hop on a project and be productive, that's why they're going to MIT. This result does not apply to the world at large.
Having said that though, I bet some of the techniques they used would apply to the world at large. I for one am going to see what I can learn from this with regards to getting people up-to-speed on new projects.
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They all worked on small projects. Where the mythical man-month applies is in the combined effort on a large, sufficiently complex project.
You're just quibbling about details. If they can get 40 interns to do 40 small problems quickly, they can certainly get 40 interns to do 10 large problems even faster. Just like 9 pregnant women can make a baby in one month. Or they can keep the original 9 month schedule, but pool their efforts to create one super-huge baby.
I have been a slashdot reader since darn near the beginning (see uid). And I finally have to admit that the quality of information here has seriously gone downhill. As everyone else has rightly pointed out, the article is bogus. They didn't break Brooke's law.
Just yesterday a server I administer which runs a very non-optimized PHP and graphics and database heavy site was linked in a story on the front page. The server barely noticed the load. A hit every other second or so. And it was a direct link, no coral caching or whatever. I remember a day when slashdot had enough readers to utterly destroy a single server. It looks like a lot of people have taken off. If this continues I may have to take off too. As it is reddit, hackernews, and many other tech news sites with superior content in my rss feed are competing with slashdot for my eyeballs. I may finally have to trim slashdot from the list if this keeps up.
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.
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