Frederick Phillips "Fred" Brooks Jr. (1931-2022) was an American writer and computer engineer. He was a project manager for IBM mainframe systems and wrote the management book The Mythical Man-Month.
Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
The essential prerequisite for building an expert system is to have an expert.
Thinkers are rare; doers are rarer; and thinker-doers are rarest.
When schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
