The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition

Key Facts and Insights

1. The Man-Month Myth: The idea that 'man-month' as a measure of productivity in software development is fundamentally flawed. It implies that men and resources are interchangeable, which is not true.
2. The Second-System Effect: The tendency for small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors.
3. Conceptual Integrity: The most critical factor in system design is the need for conceptual integrity, or a consistent and unified design vision.
4. Brooks' Law: Adding more people to a late software project only makes it later. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases.
5. The...

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