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.

Comments

wrong premise?

[cassidyc]

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.

Who cooked up such a misleading summary??

[taikedz]

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.