IN4MATX 43 Chapter Notes - Chapter Article: Dorothy L. Sayers, Software Engineering
27 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
IN4MATX – 36900 – Intro to Software Engineering
Week 4 – Reading 11 – The Mythical Man
Intro
• Time constraints and why disaster happens
o 1. Techniques of estimating are poorly developed; assumption that things
will all go well
o 2. Confuse effort with progress; hide assumption that men and months are
interchangeable
o 3. Uncertainty about estimates means we lack stubbornness
o 4. Schedule progress is poorly monitored; improvements in other
engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations
o 5. Schedule slippage is usually countered by manpower; bad because it
makes it much worse
Optimism
• All programmers are optimists
o All will go well
o Each task will hike only as long as it ‘ought’ to take
• Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker
o Divides creative activity into three stages
▪ The idea
▪ The implementation
▪ The interaction
o The idea
▪ Program comes into existence as a construct
o The implementation
▪ It’s brought to life in real space
o The interaction
▪ It’s finally complete when someone else acknowledges it; interacts
with the mind of the maker
• How does this reflect?
o Because we’re human, it’s not very clear the flaws and incompleteness of
these projects
▪ The don’t make themselves present during implementation
Implementation
• Implementation takes time and sweat
o Because of the physical media and the flaws of the conceptual ideas
o But we tend to blame the former for most of our conceptual problems
▪ As ideas are ours, but the physical media is not necessarily ours
o Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs
• Probability that things will go well becomes increasingly smaller
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
In4matx 36900 intro to software engineering. Week 4 reading 11 the mythical man. Intro: time constraints and why disaster happens, 1. Techniques of estimating are poorly developed; assumption that things will all go well: 2. Confuse effort with progress; hide assumption that men and months are interchangeable: 3. Uncertainty about estimates means we lack stubbornness: 4. Schedule progress is poorly monitored; improvements in other engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations: 5. Schedule slippage is usually countered by manpower; bad because it makes it much worse. It"s brought to life in real space: the interaction. The"man-month: cost does indeed vary as a product of the number of men and the number of months, the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job. Intercommunication: even worse, communication might even counteract the fact that there was a, software construction division of the original task.
