12. The Mythical Man Month - Part 1

I first read The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks, Jr. in 1980, five years after it was published.  A second edition, commemorating its 20^th anniversary, was published in 1995.  Amazingly, it has never been out of print and over 250,000 copies have been sold. 

Ed Yourdon, a well-known and widely published technology author said, on the publication of the second edition, that it is one of best software books ever written.  His review can be found here: http://yourdon.com/personal/books/gentech/mythman.html

I find the book to be thought provoking and have re-read it every five or six years as a sanity check.  That is amazing when you consider that the book is the result of Brooks’ work at IBM as the project manager for OS/360.  The total project took 5,000 man-years – an astounding figure then or today.   The book’s chapters cover various key learning’s in software development.  Each opens with a picture and a quotation from various sources including Ovid, Ben Franklin, President Truman, and Goethe.  My favorite is from Chapter 14:  Hatching a Catastrophe:

            How does a project get to be a year late?

            . . . One day at a time.

I have read various reviews of the book that complain that the text is dated.  To be sure, some of the references to the specific technologies are dated.  That said, I believe those readers are missing the key points to the book.  The errors that the author describes from forty years ago are still being made today.   Brooks is said to have commented that his book is called the “Bible of Software Engineering” because “everybody quotes it, some people read it, and few people go by it.” (Wikipedia).

I gave a Data Warehousing Conference talk several years ago titled “Lessons of the Mythical Man-Month applied to Data Warehousing”.  In preparation I had sent a draft of the slide deck to Professor Brooks for his review.  He kindly did so and sent back some interesting comments.   

My hope in this Blog is to quicken your interest and hopefully prompt you to pick up a copy and read it.   Over the next several weeks I will cover some of the book’s chapters that have resonated the most with me.