The Mythical Man-Month Ch. 7-9

The Mythical Man-Month
Ch. 7-9
Brooks, Frederick P
Addison-Wesley, 1995

Summary:

Chapter 7 focuses on the need for communication while working on team projects. The author first discusses the Tower of Babel as an example of when communication, rather than time and resources led to the failure of a project. Teams are often comprised of several  people working in different specialized roles. This differentiation makes communication important because the team needs to understand the status of the project as a whole and how they are going to combine their individual parts. The author suggests using meetings and workbooks to achieve this communication. The author especially stresses the use of a workbook because it gives the most detailed documentation of a project.

Chapter 8 discusses the need for correctly planning and budgeting projects. According to the author, only a sixth of the total development time should be spent on coding. This is due to the fact that many inaccuracies and bugs will need to be fixed before the final release of the project. Multiple projects being developed concurrently can also cause a hue increase i development time.

Chapter 9 discusses the importance of correctly budgeting the system requirements of components. The system requirements, such as hard drive space requirements should be determined by analyzing the systems of the users. The system should be designed with the space-speed complexity trade off in mind. That is, in most cases the more space a system takes the faster it will run. The system designer should design the components of the system to not exceed the space limitations of the users and at the same time not make the system so slow that it is unusable.

Discussion:

This reading is interesting because it discusses several trade offs that system designers should consider when designing a software system. I do think that several of the points made were common sense for the audience of the book. This work can be applied to anyone who is designing a software system or is going to be managing the development of a software system.