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Nine Pregnant Women

Also Known As: Size Isn’t Everything

Summary

An idea that adding more resources (developers) to the project will increase productivity, pace or quality has the opposite effect. As opposed to Brooks’ Law, the concern is not an overdue project, but slower pace and drop in productivity and quality in general. Therefore failure to meet mid-project milestones, release criteria, etc. The name is derived from the colloquial expression “nine women can’t make a baby in one month”.

Symptoms

• adding new people mid-project, esp. as a release deadline draws close
• the overall productivity stays the same or drops, while productivity per capita drops (at least for some time)
• higher bug rate per developer, lower feature delivered rate per developer, higher duplicate ratio
• higher communication overhead due to new people getting acquainted with the project
• underdelivering or overdue releases, milestones postponed

  Specific To

Related Anti-patterns

|Anti-pattern | Relation | |–|–| | Brooks’ Law | more specific case (“adding people to a late project makes it later”) |

Sources

[SIL’15], [RAP’12], [WIK’13], [LAP’05], [BRO’00], experience

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