2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Brooks's Law
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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prov. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later a result of
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the fact that the expected advantage from splitting development work among N
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programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N ), but the complexity and
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communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work
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is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N ). The quote is from
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Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of The Mythical
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Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early
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book on software engineering. The myth in question has been most tersely
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expressed as Programmer time is fungible and Brooks established conclusively
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that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice (though it's not the
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whole story; see bazaar ); too often, management still does. See also
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creationism , second-system effect , optimism.
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