CS190
The Mythical Man-Month Essay
tyoon


	The issues that are brought up in the reading are very relevant
and insightful.  It has presented ideas and possible solutions in a way
that I have not yet thought about in my limited experience with programming
in (large) groups.
	The thing from the readings that has affected me thus far the most
is his description that "our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort
with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable."
I was under the assumption that adding more people to a group would make
things easier as a whole, thus making the time to finish the program much
less than usual.  However, the largest group that I have worked in was three
for my CS32 final project.  We redid the game, Monopoly, where my part
was the logic, and the others were GUI, AI, and networking.
Our respective modules were separate and could be done with no,
or close to no, communication between us.  When it came time for us to
integrate, there were almost no problems because all of us were in similar
classes and lived in the same area.  If there were more people, or members
lived in different areas and had different classes, I could see how
communication could easily become disastrous.  It would be hard to schedule
times where everyone was present to take care of problems in their own code.
Also, considering if we could not make the deadline and decided to
add another member to the group, it would not be worth the effort.  Depending
on what the new member would be working on, he would have to learn not
only the overall design but also the more specific part that the previous
individual was working on.  Logic and AI would not be very time consuming,
but the GUI (using Qt) and networking would.  Also, if the person were to
help in integration, he would have to learn the workings of the modules
between where the problem lies.  Finally, one more member would also mean
another person to communicate with.  Looking back, I now realize that
the man-month really is a mythical unit of measurement even in my experience
with a group of three in CS32.