PPT Slide
Chpt 2: The Mythical Man-Month
What one factor has caused the demise of software projects?
Poor scheduling and timing estimations!
Problems with scheduling and timing estimations in a software project:
- 1) Estimation of the completion time for the software projects is typically very difficult to do.
- 2) In estimating the completion time of software projects we often assume that the effort and progress are the same, but that's not true. Especially we tend to interchange MAN and MONTH.
- 3) Scheduled progress is poorly monitored.
- 4) When software projects get behind the scheduled time, the typical solution is to add more MAN-MONTH or manpower to the software project.
In software projects we always assume that everything will go well!
In a non-software engineering project we often run into unforeseen problems that are intractable, and therefore the managers tend to over-estimate in timing requirements to compensate for them.
In software engineering, however, we always think of programming as something which is tractable and which is documented. However, this assumption is not correct because we always have bugs in software; and although bugs are tractable, they are very difficult to detect. That will make the problem almost intractable.