The Majesty of the Mythical Man-Month

I am still amazed at the number of software managers who are unfamiliar with "The Mythical man-month" lesson that says (paraphrasing here) adding more people to a late project makes it even later. So I decided to round-up some resources on the subject. Here they are:

• Wikipedia entry on the Mythical Man-Month
  
• Code Reads #1
• Serverside.com Walkthru of chapter 1
• The Mythical Man-Month curve
• MMM entry on the "Myths in Software Engineering" Wiki
• TechRepublic.com review
• Software Team-size: the Mythical Man-Month
• Classic Quotes from the Mythical Man-Month
• Late projects, man-months, and the software crisis
• Frederick P. Brook's quotes on software engineering
  
• The Mythical Man-Month and the Future of Software Development

Several of the materials I found were course lectures from various Universities:

• Univ. of Colorado lecture
• USFCA Lecture notes
• UC Irvine Lecture
• UTA Lecture
• William & Mary Lecture
• U. Virginia Lecture/Study notes
• Macquarie Univ. Lecture
  

I like the classic quotes! Among my favorites ...

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

“How does a project get to be a year late?... One day at a time.”

“Nine women cannot deliver a baby in one month”

“Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.”

“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”

“Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.”

“If a system is to have conceptual integrity, someone must control the concepts. This is an aristocracy that needs no apology.”

“The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary.”

“Build a performance simulator, outside in, top down. Start it very early. Listen when it speaks.”

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself... One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be... It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.”

“The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.”