| Main centres: | 1-3 business days |
| Regional areas: | 3-4 business days |
| Remote areas: | 3-5 business days |
Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1982, softcover, illustrated, index, 195 pages, condition: as new.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering isa book on software engineering and project management by FredBrooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995.Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behindschedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks law, and ispresented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.
Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM whilemanaging the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers toa project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had,counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistakeof asserting that one projectinvolved in writing an ALGOL compilerwouldrequire six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it requiredlonger). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project developmentled Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of SoftwareEngineering", because "everybody quotes it, some people read it, anda few people go by it".
