A woe the Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., addresses is creating a product that has now become obsolete. This specific woe spoke to me, as it has always been a huge fear of mine. I can not imagine what it feels like to have all your hard work go down the drain, simply because you were too late.
“A man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth…only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communica- tion among them”. I think it's interesting how a man and months are interchangeable when it comes to a task being performed. I feel like this would not settle well if spoken about in today's society openly when it comes to human rights and such topics.
“Computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.” This stuck out to me for the reason that I would like to remain at the same level of optimism throughout my life. I have seen how maintaining this is a valuable trait has helped adults throughout their careers, weather this is in consideration to morale or longevity. I strive to be the sweet spot between optimistic with realistic expectations.
It seems like testing is not nearly as valued or allocated time as it should be in the industry. In classes we always discuss the importance of it, but based off of what I am hearing from classmates who have worked in the industry, this is an extremely flawed process that sometimes is not even carried out in their fullest way.
Scheduling a Software Task:
⅓ Planning
⅙ Coding
¼ component test and early system test
¼ system test, all components in hand
I think it is interesting how the author has successfully allocated his time as this is his personal standard. Whenever I thought about this subject the breakdown I had always thought of being ¼ planning, ½ programming, and ¼ testing. I understand where he derives these values from and will put it into practice on my next project.
Since the article was written before Agile was created, through the explanation of its problems it is clear to see why agile was created. The Agile Manifesto and most principle related documents that I have read since reading the ACM Code of Ethics and SE Code of Ethics seem to stem from each other. I am starting to see very much of ethical overlap. I personally really enjoy pairing the Agile Method and Scrum simultaneously. When we were introduced to it in ImpactX, a class that helps you design a potential startup, scrum helped us stay on task and removed the majority of possible communication problems. This is not a popular opinion about Scrum , as I have learned from my classmates and friends, but I found that it really boils down to who the team is made up of. If everyone on the team is proactive and motivated, it seems to work in the team's favor. In order to maximize your man-month hour, one could suggested agile development to maximize man hours in that month.
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