The Mythical Man-Month • Hacker News Board

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#21

Post by Joeri » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 7:26 PM UTC

uygtfrgtyjuhk wrote: post #18

kevinburke wrote: post #6

Quick summary: The complexity of a project increases as the square of the number of people on the project, so if a project is behind schedule you may want to remove people from it, not add them. It's difficult to predict completion times for software projects but that won't stop non-technical people from setting deadlines, or from asking you to promise to meet deadlines. Waterfall development does not work.

Why is it that people all remember this as the golden rule of the mythical man month? The exact circumstances refer to a particular type of team development (surgical team) form a day when you wrote OSes in assembler and you had to coordinate who used which memory address for which variable. Yet people use the advice to avoid adding testers or documentation people to a late project to relieve the developers. We have…

The irony is that the "never add people to a late project" principle is often viewed as a silver bullet solution to save late projects.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#22

Post by JanezStupar » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 7:43 PM UTC

uygtfrgtyjuhk wrote: post #18

kevinburke wrote: post #6

Quick summary: The complexity of a project increases as the square of the number of people on the project, so if a project is behind schedule you may want to remove people from it, not add them. It's difficult to predict completion times for software projects but that won't stop non-technical people from setting deadlines, or from asking you to promise to meet deadlines. Waterfall development does not work.

Why is it that people all remember this as the golden rule of the mythical man month? The exact circumstances refer to a particular type of team development (surgical team) form a day when you wrote OSes in assembler and you had to coordinate who used which memory address for which variable. Yet people use the advice to avoid adding testers or documentation people to a late project to relieve the developers. We have…

Well he explains pretty well why adding people (any kind of people) won't work. To summarize it in one phrase: communication overhead.

You need to educate technical writers and testers on what the system does, but this is the easy part - you also have to allow for a period of transition of organization to accommodate all the new folks, that means education of the original team who is probably already panicked and stressed out..

There are two ways you can go about it IMHO to prevent total loss - triage the features and roll the thing out ASAP. Or you could try to make the most of situation by indeed adding people - but not in parallel since this will only increase the confusion. I would assign apprentices to the original team and branch off later.

In a situation like this you have to accept that you have screwed up and that there are no short term solutions. In longer term you can try to prevent similar mistakes.

Once the torpedoes are in water no amount of wishing is going to make them disappear. Time to tie down cargo and brace for impact.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#23

Post by jaymon » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 7:51 PM UTC

kevinburke wrote: post #6

Quick summary: The complexity of a project increases as the square of the number of people on the project, so if a project is behind schedule you may want to remove people from it, not add them. It's difficult to predict completion times for software projects but that won't stop non-technical people from setting deadlines, or from asking you to promise to meet deadlines. Waterfall development does not work.

Reminds me of a story about Larry Ellison:

"He told me a story of how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say, let me help you out. What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings."

I love that quote, via: http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/12/why-google-cant-build-insta...