The Mythical Man-Month
by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Effort and time are not interchangeable on work that requires communication: adding people to a delayed project increases the coordination burden faster than it adds capacity, so the project slips further.
What it teaches
Brooks drew on managing the development of IBM's System/360 operating system, and the essays have outlived their technology by half a century. His best-known claim is that people and months are not exchangeable units, because every additional person adds communication links faster than they add output — the links grow with the square of the team size while the work does not. His second is that the structure of a system ends up mirroring the communication structure of the organisation that built it, an observation he attributes to Melvin Conway and did much to popularise. He argues that a working complex system is invariably found to have evolved from a working simple one, and that a complex system designed complete from scratch will not work and cannot be patched into working. He warns to plan to throw the first version away, on the grounds that you will anyway, and holds that conceptual integrity — one coherent design vision, even at the cost of good ideas that do not fit — matters more to quality than the aggregate talent of the builders. Read it as a book about coordination cost wearing the clothes of a book about software.
The ideas this book explains
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