The Mythical Man-Month¶
Brooks, F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Boundary State Loss
- In software, design intent lives in the head of the engineer who built a system, and the codebase, comments, and commit messages are all that remain when she leaves, so the next engineer inherits a working system but not the why and accumulates defensive technical debt.
This sourceArgues that the conceptual integrity and design intent held by a system's builders is largely lost when they leave, leaving successors the code but not the rationale.
- In software, design intent lives in the head of the engineer who built a system, and the codebase, comments, and commit messages are all that remain when she leaves, so the next engineer inherits a working system but not the why and accumulates defensive technical debt.
- Interfacial Energy
- In organisational design each handoff between teams or contractors carries coordination overhead — status meetings, vocabulary translation, document handoffs, mistrust — and the cost scales with the number and length of organisational seams, not with the work done inside any team.
This sourceEstablishes that coordination overhead scales with the number of communication paths (n(n−1)/2) among team members, not with the work done — the organizational analogue of a per-seam cost.
- In organisational design each handoff between teams or contractors carries coordination overhead — status meetings, vocabulary translation, document handoffs, mistrust — and the cost scales with the number and length of organisational seams, not with the work done inside any team.
Domain-specific¶
- Requirements Churn
- The frame makes a strong negative prediction that overrides the reflex: adding engineers or pushing velocity is predicted to buy only more rework
This sourceBrooks's Law, that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Supported in partVerified against a saved copy of the source
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
- The frame makes a strong negative prediction that overrides the reflex: adding engineers or pushing velocity is predicted to buy only more rework
Mechanisms¶
- Design Complexity Review
- Its failure mode is the review spiral tipping into design-by-committee — a forum so cautious or so crowded that it dilutes good designs into compromises and slows the team to the pace of its least decisive member.
This sourceArgues that preserving conceptual integrity requires design authority to remain with one architect or a very small group of agreeing architects.
- Its failure mode is the review spiral tipping into design-by-committee — a forum so cautious or so crowded that it dilutes good designs into compromises and slows the team to the pace of its least decisive member.
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9780201835953 ×1
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-mythical-man-month/0201835959/ ×1
Registry ID ref:1680760f26ef · see in the full table