'''“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later�?''' — a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting development work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N).
The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of [[IBM]]'s OS/360 project and author of ''The Mythical Man-Month'' (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book on [[software]] engineering. The myth in question has been most tersely expressed as “''Programmer time is fungible''�? and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. [[Hacker]]s have never forgotten his advice (though it's not the whole story; see [[bazaar]]); too often, management still does. See also [[creationism]], [[second-system effect]].
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[[Category:Software]]
Revision as of 20:00, 29 October 2007
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