Buying Complex IT Systems

Chapter 12 Lessons from Fred Brooks¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003427766-12

In 1975, a project manager at IBM called Fred Brooks wrote a book called The Mythical Man-Month. The book is a series of essays on the topic of IT systems engineering, and it is so good and so important that even today it still remains relevant and is still required reading for engineers.

Given that the audience of this book are not engineers, it's unlikely that any reader of this book needs to read it in its entirety, but there is a common mistake that non-engineers make that happens to be referenced in this title of this book, but actually ends up being the second essay. For this reason, I wanted to summarise 9 essays from this book, illustrating how they relate to the content ...