The Mythical Man-Month, timeless but the Wikipedia page will do
September 27th, 2008 | By PatrickThe Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. is one of those books that you’ll find on a lot of software people’s lists. First published in 1975, the book has become a timeless record of how to manage software project teams.
The book is written based on Brooks’ experiences with large project teams for IBM working on systems that pre-date this author’s birth. While the lessons are written for software teams, they’re not necessarily about software. In fact, most of this book is focused on people and project management.
The Mythical Man-Month explains why “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” It describes project tracking and the effect of small slips in your project schedule, and the importance of documentation. You can just as easily see this on the bookshelf of an M.B.A. as an engineer.
Part of what’s so interesting about this book is that it helps you gain perspective on the history of software and where the present fits in. The industry has come pretty far since 1975, but it’s still only decades old. The essential lessons of the Mythical Man-Month will continue to become more like fundamentals and less like exact truths.
In fact, I think part of that has already happened. As someone with only a few years of software experience, I had heard a lot of the Mythical Man-Month’s lessons before. I just didn’t know their origin. I think it’s reached the status where the lessons are more important than the work. Some day it will be whittled down to what fits into a chapter of a text book, if it hasn’t already. Students today don’t read Einstein’s paper on relativity, but they’ll certainly be taught it.
My final thought on the Mythical Man-Month is that, sure, it reads a bit outdated. How could it not? You should understand what’s in this book, regardless. At this point though, you can probably get most of The Mythical Man-Month’s lessons from the Wikipedia page. Check out the whole book for a little bit of history.
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