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Brooks’ Law
Also Known As: Adding People to a Late Project Makes it Later, Size Isn’t Everything
Summary
Project becomes late (overdue) due to following the idea that adding more resources (developers) to the project will increase productivity, pace or quality.
Symptoms
- new people added mid-project, esp. when progress becomes lagging behind plan
- since that moment: the overall productivity stays the same or drops, productivity per capita always drops
- and/or: higher bug rate per developer, lower feature rate per developer, higher duplicate ratio
- and/or: more ticket comments, email messages per capita (signs of higher communication overhead due to new people getting acquainted with and communicating during the project)
- failure to meet the project delivery date, possibly also interim deadlines
Specific To
|Anti-pattern | Relation |
|–|–|
| Nine Pregnant Women | more general derivative |
| Warm Bodies | Brook’s Law can be a source of Warm Bodies |
Sources
[SIL’15], [RAP’12], [WIK’13], [LAP’05], [BRO’00]