The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
by Frederick P. Brooks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Frederick P. BrooksEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-08-12
ISBN: 0201835959
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Accessories:
- Evaluating Project Decisions: Case Studies in Software Engineering
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
- The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist
- Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development
- Software Teamwork: Taking Ownership for Success
Book Reviews of The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
Book Review: Still no Silver Bullet
Summary: 5 Stars
There were only two computer programming courses at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks in the fall of 1963, and I took them both. One involved writing machine language code on a key-punch machine to run a stack of punch cards on a surplus IBM 1620 computer. The computer and peripherals were donated to the University by the feds. The 1620 was interesting in that it had 4 kilobytes (that's kilo, not mega, and not giga) of magnetic-core based memory. Along with it's peripherals, the 1620 took up most of a room measuring, as I recall, about 15 feet by 20 feet.
I wrote a little inventory tracking program that fit on five punch cards, and ran without errors. I was enormously proud, and very full of myself at the end of it.
The other course involved the study of symbolic logic. The instructor spent the entire class writing lines and lines of symbolic code on the blackboard. He never spoke a word during this process, so we students dutifully wrote down each symbol without having a clue what any of them meant. This could not and did not last. One day the instructor did not show up for class, and never came again. We never knew what happened to him. I can't help but see these two courses in the same semester as something of a paradigm for the evolution of the computer and information processing industry itself; or at least for my place in it.
I ended up with a degree in English, but I have never been able to break permanently free of my fascination with the gizmos, devices, and plumbing underneath the high concept that we now call information technology (IT). More to the point, for the past 25 years I have been making my living in the business of building interfaces between people who want information, and the ugly black boxes that hold all those magical bits and bytes which we can define, after much effort, as data.
Today I supervise a 2 to 5 person tech team charged with web-enabling a 40 data form/250 data output format system running against a live production database containing 20 + million data records. Because we are such a small team, and we have a very large project - and in the interest of full disclosure - I have become an enthusiast for the kind of software development described as Agile. Agile is defined in the Agile Manifesto ( http://agilemanifesto.org/ ).
Agile is probably not the Silver Bullet that Brooks talks about in Chapter 16 of his excellent series of essays, but it does point the way to it. My own forecast is that some form of a biological or quantum mechanism in the memory architecture of the hardware, mirroring the Agile processes, will eventually make Brook's Silver Bullet a reality... maybe in 10 more years. At that point jobs like mine - essentially software middle-men and women helping non-techs try to convert boxes and machines full of data "bits" into real-time information - will disappear.
Brooks covers the great management issues of software design and development during this period. He shows us in these few well-written essays how we are moving from an almost pure, "top-down," engineering process to an almost pure, "bottom-up," humanistic and cultural one. Because they are essays they are all - like Agile methods - succinct, readable, and to the point. Brooks refers to Jim McCarthy, then of Microsoft, and the development manager of Microsoft's very successful Visual C++ product. In McCarthy's own book, "Dynamics of Software Development," published in 1995, McCarthy talks about the six elements of aesthetic form in the arts: unity, theme, variation, evolution, balance and hierarchy, and how these are critical to developing and delivering great software on time and on budget.
In his preface to the 1974 edition, Brooks refers to Tom Watson of IBM asking why software programming is so hard to manage. This is a great premise for the series because there is no real answer, yet, to Watson's question. It is still - more than 30 years later - very hard to manage software development, and, according to Brooks' 1985 essay, and his 1995 update, there still is "No Silver Bullet."
For tech geeks like myself, or for those who are simply trying to understand what the modern world is all about Brook's essays are must reading. Five stars - No question.
More The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) reviews:
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Summary of The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 20 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.
The added chapters contain (1) a crisp condensation of all the propositions asserted in the original book, including Brooks' central argument in The Mythical Man-Month: that large programming projects suffer management problems different from small ones due to the division of labor; that the conceptual integrity of the product is therefore critical; and that it is difficult but possible to achieve this unity; (2) Brooks' view of these propositions a generation later; (3) a reprint of his classic 1986 paper "No Silver Bullet"; and (4) today's thoughts on the 1986 assertion, "There will be no silver bullet within ten years."
The classic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. If you write code or depend upon those who do, get this book as soon as possible -- from Amazon.com Books, your library, or anyone else. You (and/or your colleagues) will be forever grateful. Very Highest Recommendation.
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