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Comment by uygtfrgtyjuhk | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that people all remember this as the golden rule of the mythical man month?

The exact circumstances refer to a particular type of team development (surgical team) form a day when you wrote OSes in assembler and you had to coordinate who used which memory address for which variable.

Yet people use the advice to avoid adding testers or documentation people to a late project to relieve the developers. We have also advanced the programming techniques and tools a little since the IBM360.

Yes adding a large number of rookie/trainee programmers to a crunch project is a bad idea - but so is saying we can't get any extra help (Brook's says so) , we will just increase the hours the devs work until they are back on schedule.

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Well he explains pretty well why adding people (any kind of people) won't work. To summarize it in one phrase: communication overhead.

You need to educate technical writers and testers on what the system does, but this is the easy part - you also have to allow for a period of transition of organization to accommodate all the new folks, that means education of the original team who is probably already panicked and stressed out..

There are two ways you can go about it IMHO to prevent total loss - triage the features and roll the thing out ASAP. Or you could try to make the most of situation by indeed adding people - but not in parallel since this will only increase the confusion. I would assign apprentices to the original team and branch off later.

In a situation like this you have to accept that you have screwed up and that there are no short term solutions. In longer term you can try to prevent similar mistakes.

Once the torpedoes are in water no amount of wishing is going to make them disappear. Time to tie down cargo and brace for impact.

The irony is that the "never add people to a late project" principle is often viewed as a silver bullet solution to save late projects.

It's not just rookie programmers. Even adding experienced programmers who are unfamiliar with the circumstances of the project will often make a project later.

I do agree with you about adding orthogonal people, provided the project manager can bring them up to speed without slowing down the development team even more.

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