Mythical beasts

In 1975 Frederick Brooks Jr. published "the mythical man-month", a series of essays on software engineering lessons from major programmes of the 1960's and 70's. For many years this was regarded as the classic work on software project learning, but today few people seem to read it.

The important lessons apply not only to software projects, but to all change projects. They remain true today. There are many excellent observations in this book, I would like to remind you of just two right now:

* Adding people to late projects only causes further delay.
* There is often a small optimum team size to solve complex problems.

In simple terms, as project complexity increases, project costs escalate and there eventually comes a point where adding further people or money simply cannot fix things. This point will vary depending on such things as the quality of management, experience of teams and tools involved. However, one thing is certain; as you approach this point the only way to achieve your objectives will be to radically redefine the problem and your approach. Anything less just postpones and increases the pain.







Often, one finds that complexity is progressively revealed during the early stages of a project, and estimates are repeated revised upwards. So build complexity measurement into your risk and estimating processes and measure it regularly. Look for the symptoms and be prepared think differently, and to kill these mythical beasts.