“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
— Fred Brooks
The baby analogy is not quite right. The thing is, a project’s timeframe can be influenced. Conceiving a healthy baby cannot. It is a funny metaphore though.
Maybe it would be better to state that
“Nine midwifes cannot deliver your baby in one month”
Found at Wikipedia Wikipedia
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September 2, 2006 at 18:50 |
My friend,
I think you need to go and read Mr. Brooks, not just pontificate on his cute quote. His point was that many operations cannot be linearly chopped and reallocated successfully. At a minimum, overhead increases with the number of parties involved. At worst, the extra time taken to train, communicate, reallocate, etc. negates the extra resources heavily or completely. This his been my own experience also in “piling on” late in a project.