Monday, June 16, 2008
Re-reading the mythical man month
I've been re-reading The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks (20th anniversary edition), in particular the "The Mythical Man-Month after 20 years" chapter. I'm amazed that he basically presages large parts of The Agile Manifesto - which was written down in 2001 and was viewed by some as radical.
The manifesto states, in short:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
In practice, these are often realized with practices like iterative, incremental development, automated unit tests, daily or continuous integration, empowered teams (a la scrum), daily short stand-up meetings to keep everyone in synch, among others.
Some of the section titles in Brook's essay are:
- An Incremental-Build Model Is Better - Progressive Refinement
- Microsoft's "Build Every Night" Strategy
- People Are Everything (Well, Almost Everything)
- The Power of Giving Up Power
I think it's wonderful that a lot of the ideas that "agile development" pushes in fact have very very deep and old roots in the history of software development.
Labels: software development management man-month agile scrum
¶ 9:05 AM
