15. The Mythical Man-Month - Part 4

This week I’ll finish discussing The Mythical Man-Month.  

Chapter 11 – Plan to Throw One Away describes the need for prototyping.  As Brooks comments, “Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away…”  Obviously many more systems have now been built than when this was written, but the caveat on planning for something remains valid.  Years ago I saw a company decide to learn a new development technology by writing a custom order processing system.  Needless to say, they should have planned to throw the first one away!

Chapter 12 – Sharp Tools describes how critical is it to have appropriate tools.  Here again, time has changed the tools but not the necessity of having good ones and knowing when and how to use them.

Chapter 13 – The Whole and the Parts describes how applications are commonly built of components.  This chapter discusses various approaches for testing them – an early description of unit and integration testing. 

Chapter 15 – Hatching a Catastrophe starts with my favorite quote in the book:  “How does a project get to be a year late?   … One day at a time.”   One of the section headings, “Milestones or Millstones”, describes the reluctance, even today, of many IT people to commit to a schedule – or to even develop one!   The concepts covered here are 100% applicable today.  Consider Brooks’ description “For picking milestones there is only one relevant rule.  Milestones must be concrete, specific, measurable events, defined with knife-edge sharpness.” 

The other quotation starting the chapter is from Sophocles:  “None love the bearer of bad news.”  The good project manager doesn’t shoot messengers but instead creates an environment where people are encouraged to speak the truth.

Chapter 15 – The Other Face describes the importance of documenting the work so that it is maintainable later.  While approaches may have changed, the need is still there.

The Epilogue consists of one paragraph.  To conclude this series of Blogs on Brooks’ work I’ll quote the first sentence:  “The tar pit of software engineering will continue to be sticky for a long time to come.”