QUOTED OFTEN, FOLLOWED RARELY - December 12, 2005

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-18 19:30:10

(FORTUNE Magazine) – In 1975, Frederick Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month. It had no right to succeed. The book detailed Brooks' experience managing IBM's bet-the-company System/360 computers and OS/360 software, and featured odd illustrations, an awkward title, and loads of jargon. Yet Brooks' deconstruction of what went right and wrong became a must-read among tech and nontech execs; dog-eared copies are still passed around. The best known passages expose flaws in the then common use of "man months"--the tool (okay, gender-biased tool) for estimating project cost and length. A 12-man-month project might have three people assigned to it for four months; if delays set in, managers simply added more people. Brooks proved that doing so increased bureaucracy and training, leading to Brooks' law: Adding people to a late software project makes it later. He also laid out new strategies for organizing teams and managing creative types. In November, Brooks, now 74 and since 1964 a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explained in his Southern drawl why people still turn to his book for guidance. Edited excerpts:

People still buy copies to give to their boss. The book is really more about management than about technology. The technology has changed immensely, so some of the old chapters are totally out of sync. On the other hand, people haven't changed much. That's why Homer and Shakespeare and the Bible are still relevant, because they're all dealing with human nature. I think that's part of the explanation for this book: The problems of managing people in teams have not changed, though the medium in which people are designing and the tools they are using have. Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering." I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.

Leave a Comment