- Tags:: đź“šBooks , Software Architecture, My Management Principles Values And Practices
- Author:: Frederic P. Brooks Jr
- Liked:: 6
- Link:: The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia
- Source date:: 1995-08-02
- Finished date:: 2020-08-10
- Cover::
On the preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition, he says something disappointing about our trade:
I was struck by how few of the propositions asserted in it have been critiqued, proven, or disproven by ongoing software engineering research and experience.
He also describes a very funny situation he lived in a plane:
The stranger sitting next to me was reading The Mythical Man-Month, and I was waiting to see if by word or sign he would react. Finally as we taxied towards the gate, I could wait no longer: “How is that book? Do you recommend it?” “Hmph! Nothing in it I didn’t know already.” I decided not to introduce myself. (p. 254)
As always, I need to quote How To Read Self Help:
But this is a hallmark of wisdom: it’s trivial to read but nearly impossible to put into practice (…) we need lots of examples to drive this wisdom home. We should be more forgiving of self-help (the genre) and more forgiving of ourselves. Putting wisdom into practice takes requxires reading, reflection, and practice.
đź”— to original context
Also, another classic, No Matter How It Looks At First Its Always A People Problem:
How can a book written 20 years ago [It’s going to be 50 years in 2025!] (…) still be relevant… (…) Hardware and software development, in contrast to manufacturing, remain inherently labor-intensive (…) The Mythical Man-Month is only incidentally about software but primarily abut how people in teams make things. (p. 254)
The title comes from one of the contained essays: “The Mythical Man-Month”, although probably the most popular essay ended up being: No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering.
“The Mythical Man-Month” expression refers to the wrongness of “man-month” measure when planning software:
Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable. Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming. (…) The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are involved (p. 16-17).
A consequence of this is the popular idea that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”, known as Brooks’s Law.
There are some very interesting essays in the book, such as:
- “4. Aristocracy, Democracy, and System Design” (related to La TiranĂa Del Thinker).
- “6. Passing the Word” and “8. Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail” (Software Documentation and proper meetings).