The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

Over the past couple months i have been reading through the book The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.  It was originally written in 1975 but many of the concepts still apply today. I have been apart of projects which have fallen into some of the traps talked about in the book. Below are some quotes (some paraphrased) from the book (one or two from my experience) i think everyone in senior management should think about before starting a large scale software development project:

1. Never build when you can buy
2. The programming project converges more slowly the nearer one gets to the end - plan for it
3. Good cooking takes time; some tasks cannot be hurried without spoiling the result
4. All programmers are optimists and are typically bad estimators
5. Men and months are not interchangeable (in my own words:  you can not take 9 women and make a baby in 1 month just like you can't double your programming staff and expect to cut the project in half)
6. Estimating is hard due to the fact that that programmers are building something that has never been built before.  If it has been built before then you should be buying it off the self...
7. Because programmers are uncertain about our scheduling estimates, they often lack the courage to defend them stubbornly against management and customer pressure.
8. Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
9. Adding manpower to a software project increases the total effort necessary in three ways:  the work and disruption of re partitioning itself, training new people and added intercommunication.
10. 1 good programmer is worth 10 mediocre ones