Book Notes: The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Overview
This post contains my notes on the book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, and Ruth Malan.
You can find the book on Amazon
I’ll be adding my notes to this post as I read through the book. The notes will be organized by chapter and will include key concepts, code examples, and any additional insights I find useful.
Chapter 1: The Tar Pit
Programming Systems Product
- Programming Product costs ~3x as much as a debugged program w/ same function
The Joys of the Craft
- Making Things
- Making things that are useful
- Fashioning complex puzzle-like objects
- Always learning
- Delight of medium
The Woes of the Craft
- Perfection
- Other people’s objectives
- Other people’s systems
- finding bugs is work
- product appears obsolete before finished
Challenge and Mission: to find real solutions to real problems on actual schedules with available resources.
Chapter 2: The Mythical Man-Month
Calendar Time Causes Issues
- Estimating is poorly developed
- Estimating techniques confuses effort with progress
- Estimates are uncertain
- Schedule progress is poorly monitored
- Natural Reaction to Schedule Slippage is to add manpower
Optimism: All programmers are optimists
Creative activities:
- idea
- implementation
- interaction
Incompleteness and Inconsistencies become clear during implementation.
The man-month
Cost = # of programmers * number of months
The bearing of a child takes 9 months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Project Planning Rules:
- 1/3 Planning
- 1/6 Coding
- 1/4 component/system test
- 1/4 system test
Gutless Estimating
- Develop and Publicize productivity Figures
- bug-incidence figures
- estimating rules
Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
