Mythical Man-Month revisited (July 27, 2009)

University professor who was teaching me computer science during my first year in the university often said that every developer should of course read Brooks’ Mythical Man-Months and in addition re-read it every year. I am not fully following this advice, but yesterday finished re-reading MMM for the third time. No Silver Bullet and later follow-up, No Silver Bullet Refired (NSBR) included in my edition of the book took most of my attention this time.

NSBR divides companies participating in any stage of the software development and getting profit from that in four broad categories (examples are mine):

• Companies manufacturing hardware and included software like operating systems (Microsoft, Apple, Palm and some less known ones)
• Companies manufacturing software for internal use (most of the banks, insurance companies, etc)
• Companies manufacturing software to be sold to the end users (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk and others)
• Companies manufacturing custom software for someone else (any outsourcing company falls into this category)

What is very interesting about this division (note that NSBR was written in 1995) is that it completely unaware about the software service market — it hasn’t existed yet. You cannot place Google in any of the categories, just as you could not do this for zillions of small profitable companies flourishing in the Internet. This fact was so surprising for me because Brooks made a lot of predicions in NSB in 1975 of which almost all became true but even in 1995 he could not foresee this huge niche. The obvious observation that commodization of Internet lead to overwhelming results, just as commodization of computers did the same earlier become striking when you see that with the angle of the software engineer with the experience of Brooks’.

I recently asked in the programmer’s community whether there is any post-MMM influential book on the process of software development and it seems like it is yet to be written. Probably, will have to re-read Mythical Man-Month next year.