Wisdom | |
Frederick P. Brooks Jr
Debugging Programming |
Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months....When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this same characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging. In tasks that can be partitioned but which require communication among the subtasks, the effort of communication must be added to the amount of work to be done....Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. |
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