Dr. Dobb's | Quick-Kill Project Management | June 30, 2006

[crispin at novell.com (Crispin Cowan)]

Wall, Kevin wrote:
>     4) Know your Brooks' _Mythical Man-Month. Management almost
> certainly
>        will offer to give you more developers/testers/etc. This is
> almost
>        always a bad ROI since you will spend more time bringing those
>        individuals up-to-speed on your project than you will get back
>        in productivity.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Open Source phenomena is that
open source projects, esp. the Linux kernel, seem to be able to violate
most of Brooks' laws with impunity. Linus has achieved absurd levels of
software development parallelism, using a very loosely knit team of
people, with different social cultures, languages, social agendas, and
most of them have never met each other. Brooks says this should be an
unmitigated disaster, yet it succeeds. Go figure :)

How Linus does this is open to lively debate. That he achieves it is
pretty hard to dispute.

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.                      http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/
Director of Software Engineering, Novell  http://novell.com
     Necessity is the mother of invention ... except for pure math