CS 458 - Week 2 Lecture 2 - 2017-08-31
* discussing MMM - Chapter 2 - "The Mythical Man-Month"
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KNOW THIS:
Brooks's Law - Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
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* why?
* work and disruption due to re-partitioning
* training the new people
* the added intercommunication
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* "More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time
than for all other causes combined."
* What are some reasons why scheduling problems are rampant?
* untoward optimism - assumption: all will go well
* confusion of effort with progress
* assumption: people and months are interchangeable
^ why the person-month is dangerous and mythical as a unit
for measuring the size of a job (and why it is
dangerous to overly depend on it as a basis for
scheduling it)
* note that, within a typical software project, there are
parts that DEPEND on other parts;
* cannot (often) insist on making people wait
* poor monitoring of schedule progress
* dangerous tendency to add warm bodies when scheduling crises occur