tneal

	While reading the Mythical Man Month, something about the design process
came to my attention.  In the book, Brooks talks about designing a project, how
you decide how many people you need to complete this project, and that adding
more people to a project is not always a good idea.  I feel that the way we are
doing the design process in class is completely backwards compared to the
process that Brooks is describing.  Rather than design a program and then
decide how many people you need to work on it, we are given the number of
people that are going to work on a project, and then we have to design a
project with that in mind.  While this is okay, it seems to me that this is
where a lot of people may be having difficulties in designing their projects.
We have to design a project that is big enough for ten people, and while it may
seem easy enough to pick one out at first, I think we have all seen that, as we
get deeper into the design of our projects, everyone needed to change some
aspect of their projects to make them bigger (or smaller) so that they could be
worked on by ten people.

	I guess the point that I am trying to make here is that it seems the design
process we are doing is harder than the one Brooks is describing in his book.
We have people in our class who have had to stretch out their project too far
in order to make sure it was divisible among ten people, and we have people who
have had to trim down their project because it was originally too big.  While
the latter might happen sometimes in the business world, I don't think projects
are stretched out too often just to make them divisible among a certain number
of people.  I think that this makes the design process even harder for us,
because I think we have all seen that trying to make a project that is
divisible among an exact number of people is definitely not that easy.