top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time

http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time.html

Mythical Man Month

http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/units/comp340/public/mythical.pdf

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~twh5b/quals/presentations/The%20Mythical%20Man-Month.pdf

http://www.infoq.com/articles/brooks-design-book-review

http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/6213/Time-to-Vanquish-the-Mythical-Man-Month.aspx

Harlan Mills Proposal

http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/units/comp340/public/mythical.pdf

Harlan Mills Proposal

• Each segment of a large project be undertaken by a team
• Team organised like a surgical team with specific roles
• One “surgeon” doing the butchery; everyone else in support
• Few minds involved in design
• Highly segmented/independent tasks
• Minimal communication during operations; only ever 1-1

The Roles

• Surgeon
• Chief programmer
• Defines all functional and non-functional specifications
• Designs, codes and tests program, writes doco
• Very experienced, very talented person
• Considerable applications and systems knowledge in relevant field
• Uses computer system to implement and test the code directly
• Copilot
  – Backup for the surgeon
  – Can do everything the surgeon does
  – But has less experience
  – Shares in design as a thinker, discussant and evaluator
  – Surgeon tries out ideas on her, but doesn’t have to accept advice
  – Copilot communicates with team; relays advice to surgeon
  – Knows all code intimately; researches alternative designs
  – Bus accident insurance
  – May write code but not responsible for it
• Administrator
  – Surgeon is the boss…BUT must spend no time dealing with personnel, space, money, machines, bureaucracy
  – This is the role of the administrator
  – Liaises with stakeholders
  – May be full-time if significant legal, contractual, reporting requirements
  – One administrator may serve multiple teams
• Editor
  – Responsible for writing doco
  – Generates external and internal descriptions
  – Takes draft provided by surgeon and refines, clarifies, amplifies
  – Criticises and reworks
  – Manages versioning
  – Inserts references and bibliographies
  – Responsible for production and publication
• Two Secretaries
  – Surgeon and administrator both have a secretary
  – Deal with correspondence and non-product files
• Program Clerk
  – Responsible for maintaining technical records of team in programming-product library
  – Trained as secretary
  – Logs all input/output for filing and indexing
  – Archiving and source management
  – Makes code available for the team to review
  – Configuration management?
• Toolsmith
  – Available to build customised utilities on request of surgeon
  – Can be called on to write procedures, libraries, macros etc
  – Any special tools for this specific project (not COTS)
• Tester
  – Devises test cases and data from functional specification
  – Tests releases in an adversarial fashion
  – Responsible for building test harnesses
  – Plans test sequences for unit and regression tests
• Language Lawyer
  – Experts in syntax and semantics of languages used in the project
  – Knows neat and efficient ways of doing things
  – Encyclopaedic knowledge of APIs and libraries

• One creative genius drives team production
  
  • But supporting roles are no less important
  • Surgeon focuses on designing and developing the system
  • Freed up from supporting but essential activities
  • Radically different from projects where each person does their own design development and testing
  • Role specialisation is critical to gaining the increases in productivity over the “average” programmer
  • Surgeon has unilateral control over decisions
  • Conforms to social psychology studies on team productivity showing authoritarian models are most productive if less satisfying than democratic or laissez-faire models
  • Model supported by Baker’s 1972 study
  • How would you structure a team based on agile/XP methodology?