Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
they added more resources. The only noticeable result was that the
project fell more and more behind schedule.
The Mythical Man-Month
was OS/360 project leader Frederick
Brooks's postmortem analysis of the failures of traditional hierarchical
management. It is one of the most widely read and oft-quoted references
on the practice of software engineering. The mythical man-month in the
title refers to the commonly held notion that progress in software develop-
ment projects occurs as a function of time spent times the number of
workers allocated—the implication being that more workers equals faster
production. Brooks dismissed this assumption with the now-famous
Brooks's law, one of the most memorable aphorisms in the lore of soft-
ware development:
adding personnel to a late software project makes it
later
. Or to use one of Brooks's more earthy metaphors, “the bearing of
a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
38
The highly quotable Brooks's law was neither the only nor even the
most signifi cant of the insights provided in
The Mythical Man-Month
.
Brooks did more than criticize existing methodologies; he provided an
entirely new model for understanding software development manage-
ment. He was fi rmly convinced that there was a wide disparity in per-
formance among individual programmers. Brooks believed that small
teams of sharp programmers were substantially more productive than
much larger groups of merely mediocre performers. But he also recog-
nized that even the best small team could only accomplish so much in
any given period of time. The small team approach simply did not scale
well to larger projects. The problem of scalability was the heart of the
“cruel dilemma” facing project managers: “For effi ciency and conceptual
integrity, one prefers a few good minds doing design and construction.
Yet for large systems one wants a way to bring considerable manpower
to bear, so that the product can make a timely appearance.”
39
And yet
the Mongolian horde model of throwing programming resources—so-
called man-months—at projects was also obviously insuffi cient. What
was needed was a way to apply the effi ciency and elegance of the small
team approach to the problems of large-project management.
Brooks proposed the adoption of what he called the “surgical team”
model of software development. In doing so, he borrowed heavily from
the work of IBM manager and researcher Harlan Mills, who had earlier
developed the CPT concept. This notion was fi rst introduced as one of
two experimental superprogrammer projects by Aron in a paper given
at a second NATO Software Engineering conference held in Rome in
1969. The fi rst experiment involved a thirty-man-year project requiring
