Brooks, Frederick P. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1975.
Overall book summary
Black and white engraving from a 1898-1904 French Encyclopedia. Source: pinterest
Claim: Preservation of the conceptual integrity of the product is critical. Large programming projects suffer management problems different in kind from small ones, due to division of labor (viii). The book works towards the way how conceptual unity can be achieved.
Supports/opposes who: the author is in conversation with a variety of his contemporaries, software engineering managers (IBM, MIT, Bell Labs, Computational Laboratory of Siberian Division, USSR).
Method: To answer Tom Watson's question why programming is hard to manage, compares the different management experiences in hardware and software development.
Why important: To managers, programmers and managers of programmers, helps them achieve higher productivity when producing software.
To general public: [tbc]
Relevance to my research: explores the methodological difficulties in software engineering.
Paradoxically, the book presents a negation to applying methods of industrial production management to software practice, but does not offer the new solution (which would be scrum, that one emerged a decade later). In other words, the critique of industrial methods is developed, while still viewing the software as a branch of this sphere, which has its own specificity, but the requirement for agile or other way of incremental delivery had still not been recognized. As it says in Wikipedia: "During the 1990s, a number of lightweight software development methods evolved in reaction to the prevailing heavyweight methods that critics described as overly regulated, planned, and micro-managed. These included: rapid application development (RAD), from 1991;[14][15] the unified process (UP) and dynamic systems development method (DSDM), both from 1994; Scrum, from 1995; Crystal Clear and extreme programming (XP), both from 1996; and feature-driven development, from 1997. Although these all originated before the publication of the Agile Manifesto, they are now collectively referred to as agile software development methods"