The Mythical Man-Month: Project Scheduling Pitfalls

This text, excerpted from "The Mythical Man-Month," critically examines common pitfalls in software project management that lead to delays. The author highlights several key issues, including poor estimation techniques rooted in unwarranted optimism among programmers who expect tasks to proceed without problems. A central argument refutes the concept of the "man-month" as a unit of progress, emphasizing that adding more people to a project doesn't proportionally shorten the schedule due to factors like communication overhead and sequential task dependencies. The text also points out that insufficient time allocated for testing, especially system testing, often causes significant delays discovered late in the development cycle, and concludes with Brooks's Law: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.