I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'mythicalmanmonth'

May 9, 2007

Manmonthery

Capturing for posterity my scribblings from a mailing list discussion:

The “You can’t have 2 women deliver a baby in 9 months” metaphor always bugged me, because there’s no room for changing scope in that (You can’t opt to just birth the torso in 5 months, then add the head and limbs at a later date).

My preferred metaphor for explaining the mythical man month is that of getting a piano up a narrow stairwell. One person trying on their own would take ages, and there’s a high risk of failure. Two or three can probably get it done reasonably quickly. But if you try to get eighty people to do it, they’ll spend ages arguing about how to go about it, get in each others’ way, and in the end, two or three of the more productive ones will probably do most of the heavy lifting while the others stand around.

I usually illustrate this point with a shot of Laurel & Hardy from their 1932 classic The Music Box

(A quick Google shows that I nicked this metaphor from this blog comment.)

May 12, 2006

O'Reilly Radar > Engineering Management Hacks: The BigBook Technique

This is one way to convince bosses about the folly of The Mythical Man-Month. “We’ve bought you many copies so that you might read it faster.”

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.