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Overcoming Brooks’ Law

  • Conference paper
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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4536))

Abstract

Most programmers are familiar with the notion that adding new resources to a project will most likely slow down progress if not bring it to a complete stop while new team members are brought up to speed. Unfortunately, in business situations there are often important opportunities missed or dollars lost if a software development team cannot increase the rate at which they complete functionality. Surprisingly, many of the practices of Extreme Programming also help teams overcome Brook’s Law and actually increase production by adding resources. If more software development teams successfully demonstrated this phenomenon, then many business sponsors would be interested in supporting the practices used by these teams.

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References

  • Brooks, S., Frederick Jr., P.: The Mythical Man-Month Essays on Software Engineering Anniversary Edition. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc, Boston, 18, 25 (1995)

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Giulio Concas Ernesto Damiani Marco Scotto Giancarlo Succi

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© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Opelt, K. (2007). Overcoming Brooks’ Law. In: Concas, G., Damiani, E., Scotto, M., Succi, G. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4536. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73101-6_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73101-6_31

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73100-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73101-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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