_______________________________________________________________________________ / It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but \ | it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to | | organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The | | manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and | | I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities. | | The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they | | could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, | | three more than the schedule allowed. | | The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they | | could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; | | it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. | | Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling | | their thumbs for ten months. | | To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control | | program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, | | but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and | | it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual | | integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would | | estimate that it added a year to debugging time. | \ -- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" / -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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