Oversimplifying outrageously, we state Brooks's Law:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
This quote is one of the centerpieces of the entire text. The “Brooks” in question is, of course, the author of the book, Fred Brooks. As the author himself admits, this is a simplification boiled down to the bare essentials of a much more complex line of reasoning that will be explained in greater detail later. The simplification is really the core, however, and one can extrapolate from the stripped-down explanation all one really needs to know. The fundamental premise of his law is to stand as a warning against managerial instinct to add manpower as the conventional approach to fixing the problem of being late.
There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
This assertion posits the concept of there being no “silver bullet.” This concept was not included in the original 1975 edition of the book and only appeared later as a result of the chapter dedicated to the concept originating as an academic paper published by the author in 1986. In the Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition, Brooks describes the “silver bullet” assertion on “provocative” before adding how “it predicted that a decade would not see any programming technique that would by itself bring an order-of-magnitude improvement in software productivity. The decade has a year to run; my prediction seems safe.”
Hence, the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable.
What, exactly, is this man-month that is so significant to the text it appears in the title? Simply put, the term refers to a hypothetical unit for measuring the amount of work done by one person over the course of a single month. The entire premise of the book revolves around that work “hypothetical” which, in the words of the author, is equivalent with mythical. This quote explains why in the briefest terms possible.
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
This certainly has all the hallmarks of being a great opening line; if not for an entire book, then certainly for a specific chapter. The line is found in the second chapter--the one actually titled “The Mythical Man-Month”--and, yes, it is the opening line of that chapter. Its significance, however, is certified by the fact that not only is this the chapter’s opening, it is also the quote which closes the chapter. Word for word. This is not a quirk that is a commonly recurring technique throughout the text. The fact that it is notable for both opening and closing the chapter lends further credence to the recommendation that this an assertion readers should not underestimate.
