Moore’s Law of big tech projects
Dana Blankenhorn cites The Mythical Man Month (by OS/360 manager Frederick Brook) in describing Brooks’ Law:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
Dana affirms this truth “because when you hire people you have to train them, and manage them. This takes time. Software development is an intellectual endeavor, so as projects become more software-intensive — and even planes today use a lot of software — Brooks’ Law holds in more places.” He calls it Moore’s Law of Software and says that anyone who has ever been inside a big, important software project knows the result of this. Late nights, all-nighters, and giant “pushes” followed by vacations and sabbaticals that are timed to the product life cycle, rather than the developer’s life cycle.
I think Dana includes a key observation when he says “one way technology deals with this is through continual cycles of destruction. If it seems that we’ve been building the same things, over and over, moving from PCs to the Internet to cell phones, and from proprietary tools to open source, we have.”
He concludes that “The best way to build something big is to build from pieces, to start from a blank sheet, so the history of technology is one of starting small, building something big from pieces, then starting over.”
Read the entire article at Smartplanet
