The Mythical Man Month By Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Essay

Introduction This paper will be used to present one of the project problems mentioned in the text of the book â€Å"The Mythical Man Month† by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. In addition, I will present my answers to the questions about the intangibility of the software and the increasing cost connected with higher reliability requirements. The last part presents my views which dependability attributes could be most crucial in four real life systems. Body Question 1: Using The Mythical Man Month reading found on the course homepage, read the project problems mentioned in the text. List the difficulties and errors that occurred in these failed programming projects. One of the project problems mentioned by Brooks Jr. in Chapter 12 of his book â€Å"The Mythical Man Month† is the problem with program maintenance. According to him fixing a bug has around 20 to 50% chances of introducing another one. As explanation he shows two reasons: first one is that in most of the projects the structure of documentation in not clear, precise and does not describe all dependencies that exist in the system and second is that the programmer who is repairing the system is typically not the same as the one who composed the code at development (Brooks Jr., 1995). So in order one project not to fail there should be more system testing per statement written then in the other cases. Brooks suggest that after fixing each bug an entire bank of previous test cases should be run against the system (Brooks Jr., 1995). ButShow MoreRelatedProject Mgmt296381 Words   |  1186 Pagescustomers outside the United States. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 WVR/WVR 0 9 8 7 ISBN 978-0-07-340334-2 MHID 0-07-340334-2 Editorial director: Stewart Mattson Publisher: Tim Vertovec Executive editor: Richard T. Hercher, Jr. Developmental editor: Gail Korosa Associate marketing manager: Jaime Halterman Project manager: Harvey Yep Production supervisor: Carol Bielski Designer: Mary Kazak Vander Photo researcher: Jeremy Cheshareck Media project manager: Cathy Tepper Cover