The Mythical Man-Month

The Mythical Man-Month

First edition
Author	Fred Brooks
Language	English
Subject	Software project management
Publisher	Addison-Wesley
Publication date	1975
Publication place	United States
ISBN	978-0-201-00650-6 (1975 ed.), 978-0-201-83595-3 (1995 ed.)
Dewey Decimal	001.6/425
LC Class	QA76.6 .B75

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.

Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project—involved in writing an ALGOL compiler—would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering", because "everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it".^[1]