Mythical Man Month [Book]

The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong or so skillful but that he ultimately sinks.

The Programming Systems Product

How do 2 programmers in a remodeled garage build an important program that surpasses the best efforts of large teams?

A Program

Garage duos typically build a program: complete in itself, ready to be run by the author on the system on which it was developed.

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

Why is this cause of disaster so common?

1. Our estimation techniques assume that all will go well, i.e. each task will take only as long as it “ought” to take.
2. Our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable.
3. Because we are uncertain of our estimates, software managers often lack the courteous stubbornness - if you’re made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you.
4. Schedule progress is poorly monitored.
5. When schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower, which is like dousing a fire with gasoline.

Optimism

For human makers, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.

The Dilemma

There are wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. Sackman et. al. found 10:1 ratios. The data showed no correlation between experience and performance.

The major part of the cost of large teams is communication, and system debugging to correct the ill effects of miscommunication.