I rarely do book reviews, but in this case I couldn’t help.
Back in 1975 I was 10 years old, and an IBM engineer, Fred Brooks, wrote a fabulous book entitled “The Mythical Man Month” containing his wisdom and advice for software engineering projects:
The title of the book comes from an important observation he made about software engineering: if you add more people to a late software project, you’re like to make it even later! But in addition there fabulous observations about other topics, like prototyping, the different between software development for projects and software development for products, and the like.
It’s just amazing: after nearly 45 years, hardly any of the most important core principles has changed. The author himself writes in his newest addition:
“In preparing my update, I was struck by how few of the propositions have been critiqued, proven, or disproven by ongoing software research and experience.”
