- the man-month is a fallacious and dangerous myth, for it implies than men and months are interchangeable
- Brooks’s Law: adding manpower to a late project makes it later (effort is needed to repartition the work, train the new people, and more time is spent on intercommunication)
- “Good cooking takes time” (Restaurant Antoine’s Chef)
- discipline is good for art: providing an architecture enhances the creative style of an implementing group
- the purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary
- “The programmer delivers satisfaction of a user need rather than any tangible product” (Cosgrove)
- all repairs tend to destroy structure, to increase the entropy of a system
- “How does one project get to be a year late? One day at a time”
- the first step in controlling a project on a tight schedule is to have a schedule with concrete, measurable milestones. A programmer will rarely lie about a milestone if it’s so sharp he can’t deceive himself.
- chronic schedule slippage is a morale-killer: “if you miss one deadline, make sure you make the next one” (Mac Carthy)
“Project managers are people who think you can give birth to one child in one month with nine women…”