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Disproving the Mythical Man-Month With DevOps
StewBeans writes: The Mythical Man-Month is a 40-year old theory on software development that many believe still holds true today. It states: "A project that requires five team members to work for five months cannot be completed by a twenty-five person team in one month." Basically, adding manpower to a development project counterintuitively lowers productivity because it increases complexity. Citing the 2015 State of DevOps Report, Anders Wallgren from Electric Cloud says that microservices architecture is proving this decades-old theory wrong, but that there is still some hesitation among IT decision makers. He points out three rookie mistakes to avoid for IT organizations just starting to dip their toes into agile methodologies.
I was under the impression (having actually read The Mythical Man Month) that the premise actually was "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" which is not the premise being discussed here.
1/ The Mythical Man Month was "referenced" (and mangled) about in an unrelated article by Eddy Baldry. It is he who mis-states the premise of the MMM
2/ Mythical Man Month's statement is "Adding more manpower to an already late project delays it further." This is different from the premise stated by Baldry.
3/ Anders Wallgren mentions nothing of the Mythical Man Month
4/ Wallgren actually does say that microservices, underpinning some of the arguments for DevOps, is not suitaed for all projects.
5/ The summary is a lie.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
Considering that to start a project a developer needs two or three or more weeks to even really start working, I doubt hat the imagined 25 developers can finish in the remaining one or two weeks anything.
Combining DevOps, Micro Services and Mythical Man Month into one headline makes no sense anyway.
Since when does a DevOp develop a micro service?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Although your version has a certain roguish charm, I prefer the elegance of the original: "The bearing of a child takes nine months no matter how many women are assigned."
I've managed software development teams for 10+ years.
It's really fucking simple: as a manager, if you wanna do a good job, you have to 1) serve as the shield that protects your devs from the shitstorm of politics and stupidity that goes on at the highest level, so that it doesn't distract them and they can, you know, build shit, and 2) choose the right devs in the first place (the difference in productivity between a good dev and a mediocre dev can be fucking scary, let me tell you, we're talking 20x sometimes)
That's it. Choose the right devs, let them do their work, make sure you make their obstacles vanish in advance. All this agile and scrum and shit, I've tried it, it's crap; if you need it, you don't have the right team. The only management tool I need is a Trello board and github and meeting one-on-one with the devs every now and then because they'll never come up to you and tell you when they have a personal issue.