Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition Anniversary Edition

Oddly, I was reminded of this classic work whilst reading Chris Date's otherwise quite unremarkable tome, "The Third Manifesto". Date and Darwen cite this classic text admiringly. And this may be the most important contribution to have emerged from their efforts. Having toiled in the Information Technology field for decades, I was, of course, familiar with many of the gems of wisdom that were first articulated by Brooks in this classic book. But it was a true joy and revelation finally to read the book itself from cover to cover.Among the pearls of wisdom contained within these pages are the following:Adding people to a late software project tends to make it later.While it takes one woman nine months to give birth, nine women cannot accomplish the same task in one month. (Hence, the concept of the mythical man month. People and time are not interchangeable commodities.)The factor most dispositive of success in software engineering is conceptual integrity.The first duty of the manager is create a concise and precise written plan.Communication, and its attendant, organization, require as much skill and careful consideration as any other aspect of technical project leadership.There are many, many more wonderful insights contained within the corpus of this outstanding book. While dated, no doubt, the truths that emerge from careful consideration of this important work are that overcoming problems of human interaction are really paramount to success in any task as complicated as software engineering and that the discipline of software engineering is perhaps one of the most wonderfully rewarding career paths open to creative and serious folks even today. This outstanding book rightly deserves an honored place in the library of any person who would succeed in a career in information technology now, or in the future. Yes, it deals with human factors that some may argue can be overcome by technology. But, as Brooks so cogently demonstrates in his wonderful essay on the "silver bullet", the search for the final solution to the problem of software engineering is very much like the hope to slay the mythical werewolf with a silver bullet in that it is a search for an enigma to deal with a chimera. It can't realistically hope to succeed.Finally, in assessing the timeless importance of this classic, we are reminded of the sage advise of that great philosopher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, that, when working with people, everything is political. Yes, the human factors always do matter. And Dr. Brooks has illuminated those human factors of software engineering in a manner both satisfying and edifying. Pick up this timeless classic. Absorb the teachings. And watch your productivity and effectiveness in the discipline soar. God bless.

While it was a long time ago (it was written in 1975), much of the book's information is still relevant. For example, Fred talks about Artificial Intelligence in Chapter 16. It also talks about expert systems and inference engine technology. How can it be obsolete or outdated?For a small project, this is probably overkill. However, this is valuable for large projects, whether you are a programmer, engineer, project manager, or senior management. With a big project, it's more than just building something, having the right people, right organization, the coordination, the tools for debugging, and how to bring it up etc,.Many of us are probably experiencing OS or system issues and are wondering if the developers have done any testing before pushing it out to the users. How many of us know that when something is changed, it might require validation from the ground up again, i.e., it takes time and resources and costs more money.A lot of it comes down to discipline and judgment. This is something most of us can learn from the book. If you build something, you need ways to debug it too. And for people to use it, we need good documentation and not just a few lines of instructions.Yes, the mainframe might be a dinosaur to many of us. But guess what, we are still using what same things that were used in mainframes back then e.g., memory and disk etc., To get the best out of this book, focus on the concept and best known methods. And most importantly, Fred's foresight.

The Mythical Man-Month is Frederick Brooks' seminal collection of essays vis-a-vis software engineering. From the title, one would imagine that the tome's unifying thesis revolves around the discredited idea that adding more engineers to a project will enable the project to be completed in fewer months, or, to put it another way, that the length of a project's schedule is a linear function of the number of workers assigned to that project. Using graphs based on mathematical formulas and on research conducted by other specialists, Brooks neatly dismantles the person-month myth - demonstrating, in fact, that in many projects (particularly if complex interrelationships are required or if the project is behind schedule), adding more bodies often increases the time required for completion.Despite what the title suggests, however, the above-mentioned topic is but one of many covered by this work. Other topics include the distinction between the "essential" and "accidental" elements of software design; the distinction between building a computer program vs. designing a "programming a systems product" (and the ninefold difference in complexity and time between the two); the quest for software engineering's elusive "silver bullet"; the importance of documentation; the surprisingly small percentage of time that actual writing of code occupies on the timeline of a typical software-development project (as contrasted with time needed for testing and debugging); large teams vs. small "surgical teams" (and why the latter isn't always the answer for all projects); the "buy versus build" dilemma; and many others.Much of the material in the first several chapters of the book appears obsolete (although there are still valuable principles that can be gleaned). However, in chapter 19 (a kind of "retrospective" chapter added 20 years after the original publication date), Brooks amends much of the out-of-date material, e.g., his earlier views on program size and space metrics (rendered all but irrelevant in this age of multi-gigabyte memory), and the degree to which the (albeit hard-to-predict) personal computer explosion and the growth of the Internet. However, even since the time of the book's revision (1995), further explosions have taken place in the computing industry - most notably with regards to Web 2.0, the ubiquity of data-driven Web applications (these even obsoleting many shrink-wrapped products), Web services, and development methodologies such as Agile and XP - that even chapter 19 may seem a little out-of-date to the modern developer. In spite of this, the principles of the book are still applicable: the chapters on estimation, team size, and the dismantling of the person-month myth are enough to make this tome required reading for developers and managers alike - especially the latter.