“In 1975, Frederick Brooks published ‘The Mythical Man-Month.’ It had no right to succeed. The book detailed Brooks’ experience managing IBM’s bet-the-company System/360 computers and OS/360 software, and featured odd illustrations, an awkward title, and loads of jargon. Yet Brooks’ deconstruction of what went right and wrong became a must-read among tech and nontech execs; dog-eared copies are still passed around. The best known passages expose flaws in the then common use of ‘man months’—the tool (okay, gender-biased tool) for estimating project cost and length. A 12-man-month project might have three people assigned to it for four months; if delays set in, managers simply added more people. Brooks proved that doing so increased bureaucracy and training, leading to Brooks’ law: Adding people to a late software project makes it later. He also laid out new strategies for organizing teams and managing creative types. In November, Brooks, now 74 and since 1964 a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explained in his Southern drawl why people still turn to his book for guidance,” Daniel Roth writes for Fortune.
A few excerpts:
If a project is already late and throwing more people on it is just going to make it worse, how do you solve the problem?
One is to officially slip the schedule. And officially doing it has many benefits over unofficially letting it slip. Peter Fagg, a really wise System/360 engineering manager, gave very sound advice: ‘Take no small slips.’ That is, if you’re going to take a slip, get everybody onboard, get organized, and take a six-month slip, even though you may at the moment feel as if you’re only four months late. The other obvious solution is to lighten the ship: Decide there are some things we’re not going to do. A third thing is to phase the work: Say, ‘All right, we’re going to do a version that has just the essentials for the most important or most numerous users.’ Meanwhile schedule and develop the things that should go in version 2 and ship them later.
Sounds like a recipe for Microsoft’s Vista, its long-delayed and now pared-down new operating system. Does it surprise you that the same mistakes are being made 30 years later?
No. People still build bridges that fall in. That art has two centuries of engineering practice behind it, if not three. The software engineering discipline is just plain younger than the electrical engineering discipline. So software is less mature than hardware, and by a whole generation of people. Also, the median age of the practitioners is probably younger.
What’s your computer setup today?
I happily use a Macintosh. It’s not been equalled for ease of use, and I want my computer to be a tool, not a challenge.
What do your former colleagues think of your being a Mac user?
I haven’t discussed it.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “drz” for the link.]
MacDailyNews Take: Frederick Brooks is a smart man.
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