Frederick P. Brooks (1931–2022)

This book was written in the sixties, yet, I find its recommendations and requirements for software development are just as helpful, humorous and educational in the 21st century. I still don't understand how they got any work done back then with manually teletypes, printed requirements documents being updated everyday and the like, but they still had the exact same problems we do now.

The two things I took away most, "the more people you add to a late project, the later the project is." Along with the title of the mythical man month, is the idea "nine women can't make a baby in a month." The other point, was that whatever your estimate is for development time, you need to consider at least twice as much for validation. This is counter intuitive, you develop it once, you test it once, and that test takes less time than writing code did, but there is so much more. The covers testing for each release, it covers finding regressions later, and any other issue that may be written against that piece of code that wasn't exposed when it was first authored. These good testers make bug fixing much easier.… (more)