I was listening to a podcast with Joel Spolsky recently. He told a story that when he went to Microsoft, they had done internal research (and experiments) to debunk some of the theories from Fred Brooks' "Mythical Man Month". At the time, he generally believed in the "rules" from "Mythical Man Month", and was pleasantly surprised to learn about this further research. In short: Adding more developers does help, up to a certain point.
Fred Brooks never said that adding more developers does not help -- he was stating that solving the single problem of being late will only be exacerbated by adding more people.
To use the infamous analogy that "nine women can't make a child in one month": it is still true, but if your goal is to have more children (as opposed to having one child be born sooner), adding more women would certainly help.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I thought the “actual” rule as articulated was. “Adding people increases communication overhead. At a certain point, more people cannot increase speed but actually makes things slower”.
Hence the more pithy “Adding people to a late project will make it later”. The assumption being that you’ve already maximised the number of people that could work on the thing (trying to get it out the door on time).
> Adding more developers does help, up to a certain point
Did it mention any insight on what that point is? And did it contrast against any other approach in the studies? Like look at opportunity cost of this versus other ways to deliver faster?
P.S.: And I didn't mean that those levers are always wrong, more that I've noticed this bias towards the main levers each person has at their disposal. If there's no check on that bias, you, for example, end up in a company that keeps hiring at a furious pace and keeps rewriting all their services all the time in new languages or alternate designs to no end, because everyone just uses their obvious lever as much as possible with the good intent of trying to solve all the problems in the way they can.
