The Mythical Man-Month

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". This idea is known as Brooks' law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had mistakenl... more

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". This idea is known as Brooks' law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had mistakenly added more workers to a project falling behind schedule. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project — writing an Algol compiler — would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved. (It required longer.) The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering", because, "everybody reads it, but nobody does anything about it!" The work was first published in 1975 (0-201-00650-2), reprinted with corrections in 1982, and... less