Software Engineering discussion

This chapter is a little Mythical Man-Monthy, in miniature.

It strikes me that most of the studies and books on software productivity and economics, and how they scale, are getting pretty dated. I think it is time for some serious studies of the various iterative and agile techniques, especially on large projects.

In my experience, as companies gain more experience, they make mistakes and add to processes to address those mistakes. This is a good thing for a while, but over time a lot of cruft accumulates, so every once in a while the process needs a good spring cleaning.

Yes, I noticed some of the metrics were from Mythical Man Month along with some of the take-away lessons. References at the end of the chapter confirmed that too.

I have little to no experience working with a 50+ programmer team, so I'll just accept the lessons in this chapter to be mostly true about non-linear scale for certain tasks.

Data in this chapter suggests that larger project require higher number of programmers whose responsibilities anything else but not programming. I guess lesson for a person like myself who enjoys construction – stay on medium size projects in small to medium size teams…

If your first love is the construction phase, I think that is the right conclusion.