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This book was written in the era of time sharing systems, procedural programming, and about 30 fewer years in software engineering experience. With the improvement of things such as existing libraries, higher level languages, IDES, and the amount of documentation and examples available on the internet how much of the book still holds true?
While I can believe that adding new people to a project may initially slow it down I would think things such as unit testing, separation of concerns, and other forms of automation and design improvements would allow new members of a team to become productive faster then assumed in the book, assuming the project had good design documentation and processes in place.
I don’t have experience on large projects or with large teams so am interested to hear what those of you who do have experiences with them think. edit: I was wondering if new communication tools such as Wikis, instant messaging, and the internet in general decreased the time spent communicating. Based on everyones answers I would say that any increase in communications efficiency has been offset by increased complexity.
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Man-month is a hypothetical unit of work representing the work done by one person in one month; Brooks's law says that the possibility of measuring useful work in man-months is a myth, and is hence the centerpiece of the book.
This is summed up by Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. The idea of a man-month, a unit of work that can be completed in one month by one man is a myth - and hence the title of the book.
It's odd to think that one key theory on software development turns 40 this year. In 1975, Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month, a book to help understand how to undertake complex development projects. It remains as essential today, as when it was first published.
Brooks' Law refers to a well-known software development principle coined by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month. The law, “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later,” states that when a person is added to a project team, and the project is already late, the project time is longer, rather than shorter.
It is still as true today as the day it was written. This is because it is fundamentally about communication between people working on the same project, and none of the advances of the past 30 years have substantially changed that.
Of course, we have learned a lot in those 30 years, but all improvements in our tools and undertanding have been incremental, in accordance with Brooks' "no silver bullet" prediction.
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