Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

019 Brooks’ Law

For certain types of projects, adding people to speed things up inadvertently slows them down.

Brooks’ law, proposed by the software engineer Fred Brooks, is a counterintuitive phenomenon that occurs when adding manpower to a late project with the intention of speeding it up ends up slowing it down.1

Brooks proposed the law for software projects, but it applies to any project or task in which any of these statements are true:

• The project or task requires significant ramp-up time — The time it takes for new team members to become productive. In complex projects, not only are new team members unable to contribute initially, they also require support from key people working on the project, taking those people off task and slowing ...