The Mythical Man-Month

the benefits Pius XI predicted: the center gains in real authority by delegating power, and

Especially noteworthy is his comment that new people added late in a development project must be team players willing to pitch in and work within the process, and not attempt to alter or improve the process itself!

How true is Brooks's Law

I dismissed Parnas's concept as a "recipe for disaster" in Chapter 7. Parnas was right, and I was wrong. I am now convinced that information hiding, today often embodied in object-oriented programming, is the only way of raising the level of software design.

Rather less familiar, but very important, is Parnas's concept of designing a software product as a family of related products.11 He urges the designer to anticipate both lateral extensions and succeeding versions of a product, and to define their function or platform differences so as to construct a family tree of related products (Fig 19.3).

After every function works at a primitive level, we refine or rewrite first one module and then another, incrementally growing the system.

The basic fallacy of the waterfall model is that it assumes a project goes through the process once, that the architecture is excellent and easy to use, the implementation design is sound, and the realization is fixable as testing proceeds.

Purpose is the key to understanding; even high-level language syntax does not at all convey purpose.

Limited evidence shows that interactive programming at least doubles productivity in system programming

The project manager's chief daily task is communication, not decision-making; the documents communicate the plans and decisions to the whole team