January 23rd, 2004
Of Brooks' Law
There have been careful studies evaluating the validy of Brooks' law. According to Brooks, the best treatment is that of Abdel-Hamid and Madnick [1]; and Stutzke [2] develops a simpler model to perform a similar investigation, with a similar result.
I have never really worked on a major software project per se, but it does intrigue me: neither of the above model takes into account the fact that work must be re-partitioned, which Brooks thinks is non-trivial, and I can only imagine that to be true.
[1] Abdel-Hamid, T., and Madnick, S.: “Model enhancement and Brooks' law”, Software Project Dynamics: An Integrated Approach, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991.
[2] Stutzke, R.D.: “A Mathematical Expression of Brooks' Law”, 9th Int. Forum on COCOMO and Cost Modeling, Los Angeles, 1994.
I have never really worked on a major software project per se, but it does intrigue me: neither of the above model takes into account the fact that work must be re-partitioned, which Brooks thinks is non-trivial, and I can only imagine that to be true.
[1] Abdel-Hamid, T., and Madnick, S.: “Model enhancement and Brooks' law”, Software Project Dynamics: An Integrated Approach, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991.
[2] Stutzke, R.D.: “A Mathematical Expression of Brooks' Law”, 9th Int. Forum on COCOMO and Cost Modeling, Los Angeles, 1994.
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