Notes

1. Brooks, Frederick P., Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. The original edition was published in 1975.

2. Data on frequency of schedule pressure comes from Capers Jones, Assessment and Control of Software Risks, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Yourdon Press, 1994. For information on common schedule performance, see The Standish Group, "Charting the Seas of Information Technology," Dennis, MA: The Standish Group, 1994; and Capers Jones, Patterns of Software Systems Failure and Success, Boston, MA: International Thomson Computer Press, 1996.

3. I discuss this in detail in Rapid Development (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1996).

4. Bronson, Po, "Manager's Journal," Wall Street Journal, February 9, 1998.

5. Bylinsky, Gene, "Help Wanted: 50,000 Programmers," Fortune, March 1967, pp. 141ff.

6. Brooks, Frederick P., Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975.

7. This number is estimated. It is based on the reported cost for Windows NT being $150 million (Zachary, Pascal, Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft, New York: Free Press, 1994) and a fully burdened labor cost of $100,000/staff-year.

8. Effort was approximately 5,000 staff months. Brooks, Frederick P., Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975.

9. Cole, Andy, "Runaway Projects Cause and Effects," Software World, Vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 3 5. The Standish Group, "Charting the Seas of Information Technology," Dennis, MA: The Standish Group, 1994.

10. Frosch, Robert A., "A New Look at Systems Engineering," IEEE Spectrum, September 1969.

11. Rich, Charles, and Richard C. Waters, "Automatic Programming: Myths and Prospects," IEEE Computer, August 1988.

12. Bylinsky, Gene, "Help Wanted: 50,000 Programmers," Fortune, March 1967, pp. 141ff.