University Virtual Learning Environment 3.0

Mythical Man Month

I suggest the book Mythical Man Month, a book written by Frederick Brooks, Jr. It is a book discussing and evaluating software engineering practices based from actual field experience of the author.

Some of the things I found relevant in UVLe 3.0 are:

1.) As much as possible, buy/get/reuse code of other people or from previous projects. This removes a lot of overhead time to create an application.

2.) Adding manpower to a late project will NOT save the project, actually it will make it later. This is due to the addition of needed time for the new men to learn the project, and the added overhead cost of communication.

3.) How does a project gets three months late in schedule? One day at a time (hint hint). One day that slipped in the schedule in the Gantt chart is the start of the catastrophe that is waiting for the whole project.

Though it was written in 1975, it is still very relevant in software engineering today.

posted by Ardee Aram @ 9:22 PM