The Mythical Man-Month
Brooks, Frederick P., Jr.
Addison-Wesley, 1995
Summary
Chapter 7, with its title asking Why Did the Tower of Babel Fall?, discusses the importance of documentation, communication, and organization. Teams communicate informally, meetings, and through workbooks. A project workbook is extremely important: it answers what, why, and the mechanics of the project. Communication is critical with the advent of the division of labor and specialization. Each person knows what only small parts of the whole project are doing and needs to communicate with others for the other parts. The author gives various situations that can occur between the producer and technical director.
Chapter eight, entitled Calling the Shot, talks about estimations and their inaccuracies. Coding should only be budgeted for about one-sixth of the development time of a project. The estimated development time for small projects cannot be interpolated to anticipated the cost of large systems. Testing showed that many programmers were underestimating the time to accomplish tasks by almost half since they did not consider that they would have many other obligations as well. Data supporting these conclusions from Aron, Harr, the O/S 360 project, and Corbato was presented. It is also asserted that using a suitable high-level language can increase productivity by as much as five times.
Chapter nine is called Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack. The chapter discusses space complexity and planning. The design team must set targets for the space allowed for each component of the system. Controlling size involves studying the users and what applications they use. In addition, each component needs to have a set access budget (for things like the hard drive). To help estimate, what each component does needs to be well-specified beforehand or the estimation will be very inaccurate. However, using more space can increase performance of the system. Much improvement can be made by redoing the data representation format.
Opinion
Most of these chapters are highly out-of-date (it talks about typewriters...). Very little can be gleaned from its pages other than intellectual curiosity at the state of the industry thirty years ago. Most of what is expounded here goes against modern advise such as Agile development.
This book is out-of-date
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