Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Mythical Man-Month

hn-books.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#11

Post by huherto »

gjm11 wrote: post #4
ilcavero wrote: post #2

This book is like reading Aristotle, it feels pretty old but it talks the truth and the truth never changes

Aristotle was a very smart chap, but it's hardly the case that everything he said was unchangeable truth. (Random examples: his fundamental physics was really, really wrong -- see http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/aristotle_dy... for a very brief summary of some important errors; he said that men and women have different numbers of teeth, which they don't; his distinction between "substance" and "accide…

What I find amazing about them is that they were able to figure out so many things with a very limited body of knowledge. I understand they missed the mark in many things, but still they were able to come up with many great ideas(even if they were wrong).

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#12

Post by drallison »

The Mythical Man Month is a classic. I'd suggest that you also read the transcriptions of the two NATO Software Engineering Conferences -- Garmishch 1968 and Rome 1969. They were incredibly influential and still make good reading thanks to the efforts of Brian Randall and others. Many of the classic software engineering quotes come from these conferences. The citeseer cache links are:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.14.2...

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.127....

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#13

Post by j_baker »

I think this (along with Peopleware) should be required reading to start a software company. It's incredible how many companies still make fundamental (and preventable) errors in running a software project.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#14

Post by lolfoo »

sabat wrote: post #9
ilcavero wrote: post #2

This book is like reading Aristotle, it feels pretty old but it talks the truth and the truth never changes

I agree with the author's concepts, but I find this book unreadable. It's just too darned dense -- needlessly dense.

It's one of the easiest reads on my shelf.

What do you want, a version where you find Waldo instead?

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#15

Post by kokon »

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.

That's one thing.

The other problem he was also trying to cover was, how do you scale? When you are dealing with a big project, how can you tame the complexity of dealing with so many people?

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#16

Post by yoyar »

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.

> Waterfall development does not work. < All evidence that I've seen confirms this. Yet, in companies where they practice waterfall, all the evidence in the world can't seem to convince them of this fundamental problem. The solution is try "more" waterfall, or to alter the process of waterfall. The cognition that it isn't working, despite mountains of evidence just doesn't seem to register. I suppose this is due to an already dysfunctional company culture.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#17

Post by peterquest »

As a student, I read "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg, which makes several references to this book. In it, they run into just about every conceivable problem a software project can encounter, which makes for a pretty fun read.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#18

Post by uygtfrgtyjuhk »

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 also advanced the programming techniques and tools a little since the IBM360.

Yes adding a large number of rookie/trainee programmers to a crunch project is a bad idea - but so is saying we can't get any extra help (Brook's says so) , we will just increase the hours the devs work until they are back on schedule.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#19

Post by duncanj »

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…

It's not just rookie programmers. Even adding experienced programmers who are unfamiliar with the circumstances of the project will often make a project later.

I do agree with you about adding orthogonal people, provided the project manager can bring them up to speed without slowing down the development team even more.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

#20

Post by Joeri »

yoyar wrote: post #16
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.

> Waterfall development does not work. < All evidence that I've seen confirms this. Yet, in companies where they practice waterfall, all the evidence in the world can't seem to convince them of this fundamental problem. The solution is try "more" waterfall, or to alter the process of waterfall. The cognition that it isn't working, despite mountains of evidence just doesn't seem to register. I suppose this is due to a…

It's worse. I've proven, with cold hard numbers, that our waterfall process didn't work and gotten agreement. But I get told that we _have to_ provide a waterfall schedule to some of our key customers (big multinationals) or otherwise they won't believe we'll deliver, because everybody that's not in software knows by now that waterfall is how all real software gets made. le sigh

So, what we do know is we make up a waterfall schedule to give to the customer, and then we do our own thing afterwards.

Post reply on HN