14. The Mythical Man-Month - Part 3

This week I’ll continue discussing some of my favorite chapters from The Mythical Man-Month.  

Chapter 5 - The Second-System Effect describes the dangers of the second system someone designs.  On the first one the designer is careful, noting additional features (aka bells and whistles) to be used next time.   As Ovid observed about two thousand years ago:  Add little to little and there will be a big pile.   The second system is an unmanageably large pile of poorly integrated features.  The good designer learns from this and the third and subsequent systems are better.  This is truly human nature.

Chapter 6 – Passing the Word describes how critical is it to have every one on the team on the same page when it comes to certain key concepts and standards.  In addition Brooks describes how change control should be handled.

Chapter 7 – Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail? describes how critical communication and project organization are – especially for a large project.  As Brooks observes “The Tower of Babel was perhaps the first engineering fiasco, but it was not the last.”

Chapter 8 – Calling the Shot covers estimating how long a project will take.  While the examples are dated, the concepts are clear.  As Ben Franklin said in Poor Richard’s Almanac, “Experience is a dear teacher, but fools learn at no other.”

Chapter 9 – Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack is probably the least applicable chapter in today’s world.  When the book was written, writing efficient code was important; today it is a largely ignored concept except in processing large volumes of data or in the development of low latency programs for trading where even the geographical location of the data center is considered.

Chapter 10 – The Documentary Hypothesis is “Amid a wash of paper, a small number of documents become the critical pivots around which every project’s management revolves.   These are the manager’s chief personal tools.”  I believe this to still be true today.

Next week I will cover the remaining chapters.  I hope you can see how applicable these 35+ year old concepts still are.