Thoughts on the Myth of Man and Moon

Human Moon Myth Impressions

Before reading this book, I have heard a lot of news about the man-month myth and his author Brooks. In the field of software, "People's Month myth" has far-reaching influence and sells well. This time, just as the teacher's homework asked us to read the book, I finally got the chance to read this classic. In the past few weeks, a bit of reading this book, a cursory understanding of the book.

First of all, what impresses me is the two famous laws of the Myth of Man and the Moon:

1. Man-month myth: putting more human resources into a project that has been postponed will only make it more postponed.

The human moon myth looks so romantic name, originally did not really say the myth story, the author elaborated the main viewpoint is in the Software development project the project progress and the increase personnel these two concepts are not interchangeable. Although it has been more than 20 years, this book still gives me a shock, one is to my surprise, the United States 20 years ago the problem of software projects, we still do, the bad situation has not changed, we still struggle in the tar pits, and there seems to be no solution. The subconscious (and the traditional) response is to increase manpower when reading "is the shift in awareness of progress." It's like using petrol to extinguish a fire, only to make things worse. The growing fires require more petrol, which leads to a cycle destined to cause disaster. This makes me understand one important way: the progress of the project is not to be promoted by the increase of manpower.

2. No silver bullet: without any technical or managerial progress, it is possible to independently promise to achieve quantitative advances in productivity, reliability or simplicity for a decade.

Although there are many people who oppose or disagree with his views, I always feel that his views are right-the division and definition of fundamental and secondary issues. The author argues that the difficult part of software development is the structure of concepts, such as the structure of concepts such as normalization, design, and testing, rather than concept formulation and implementation concepts, although the implementation concept may take up less than 90% of the time, like today's software development, system analysis typically takes up less than 20% of the total project development time, and 80 % of the time spent programming the same.

These two principles have been validated over the past few decades. I believe that in the future, it will still be set up.

In addition, in the tar pits chapter, there is a sentence that I can not forget: the boat on the shore, like the lighthouse at sea, cannot move.

Yes, the big system development of the past few decades is like such a tar pit, where many large and strong animals struggle violently. Most of them have developed operational systems-but only a handful of them meet the goals, timelines and budgets. A variety of teams, large and small, complex and lean, one after another drowned in the tar pits. Seemingly no single problem on the surface can cause the difficulty to be solved, but when they are entangled and accumulated together, the team's actions become more and more slow. Everyone seems to be surprised at the degree of trouble, and it's hard to see the nature of the problem. However, if we want to solve the problem, we must try to understand it first. This is the truth of life. To solve one thing, we must first understand the whole story. Ask questions is the answer to the problem.

People's Month myth also let me understand that software systems may be the most complex of human creation. Often a small function, it is also necessary to develop the staff of the architectural design, the impact and expansion of other modules, as well as coding work. What users may see in the foreground is just a few words, the result of a day-to-day struggle between development staff. Most of the time, the customer's needs change, they look so easy in their eyes, but they ignore a lot of things they do not see.

In a word, the myth of People's month is a myth of it, enduring. It's like a "silver bullet" that teaches us how to eliminate software projects this "human wolf", guiding every it practitioners to develop and forge ahead. People's month myth will lead the IT industry elite to create another IT industry myth.

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Thoughts on the Myth of Man and Moon