Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, The: Essays On Software Engineering

The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit of effort used in estimating and scheduling: the man-month. Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and m

This book is a belated answer to Tom Watson's probing questions as to why programming is hard to manage.

How does one control a big project on a tight schedule? The first step is to have a schedule. Each of a list of events, called milestones, has a date. Picking the dates is an estimating problem, discussed already and crucially dependent on experience. For picking the milestones there is only one relevant rule. Milestones must be concrete, specific,

The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary; hence organization is a radical attack on the communication problems treated above.

Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erikson, and Grant were measuring performances of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between best and worst p

It is more important that milestones be sharp-edged and unambiguous than that they be easily verifiable by the boss. Rarely will a man lie about milestone progress, if the milestone is so sharp that he can't deceive himself. But if the milestone is fuzzy, the boss often understands a different report from that which the man gives. To

Fostering a total-system, user-oriented attitude may well be the most important function of the programming manager.

We centralized all our machines and tape library and set up a professional and experienced machine-room team to run them. To maximize scarce S/360 time, we ran all debugging runs in batch on whichever system was free and appropriate. We tried for four shots per day (two-and-one-half-hour turnaround) and demanded four-hour turnaround. An auxiliary 1

A good workman is known by his tools. —PROVERB