The Inmates are Running the Asylum Ch 3-5

Reference Information

Title: The Mythical Man-Month

Author: Frederick P. Brooks

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Summary
Chapter 3 discussed the problem of wasting money in software development, since it lacks of understanding of what it means to be "done". Management insists that shipping a product sooner rather than later is better due to lack of clear vision, and programmers race to meet the too-short deadline. Since it is easy to get carried away with adding more and more features, it is difficult to know when a piece of software should be considered done. This chapter described Parkinson's Law (work will expand to fill the time allotted to it), feature-list bargaining to define a precise list of features, prototyping, and the wrong idea of the unpredictable market.

Chapter 4 discussed the "dancing bear", or software that is sub-par, but acts as if it is not. Users won't know there's something better until they see real "dancing". The faults of software were then listed, including forgetfulness, laziness, and inflexibility.

A dancing bear. You won't know real quality until you see an actual dancer.
Source: theolivepress.es

Chapter 5 discussed how important it is for a product's success to have the fierce loyalty that a well-designed product generates from its clients. The primary qualities of a high-technology business include viability (the contribution of business people), capability (what technologies bring), and desirability (what makes the product something that people would want). To design a good product, first you should decide what customers will find desirable, then build it and sell it.


Discussion
I think these chapters brought up some very helpful hints about producing good software, although the dancing bear analogy was a little strange. I especially liked the statement that programmers don't know what done is. It's true, we often just keep saying "oh, I could add this feature!" It would be good to keep this in mind when working on the capstone project, and future programming projects, so that we can limit the number of features to only those really desired by the user.