

9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month - kerben
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/9-women-cant-make-a-baby-in-a-month/

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ja27
A quote from an Agile / Scrum talk I saw last week: "Agile delivers things
sooner, not necessarily faster."

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Typhon
Also, 9 women can't make a baby at all without a man.

So, instead of 9 people with similar abilities, it's better to have 2 people
whose abilities complement each other.

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UnFleshedOne
True if you need just one baby. If you need one baby per month on the other
hand... Not quite sure how that translates to software development though...

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jamaicahest
Even then you would not get the first baby for at least 9 months. After that
you would get one baby every month circa, but just as with most software
development situations you can't speed up the first baby growth by throwing
more people at it.

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iwwr
_you can't speed up the first baby growth by throwing more people at it_

No, but you can make the process more interesting. You could... _monetize_ the
situation.

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artmageddon
I thought there were laws against that :)

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m0nastic
I've actually always disliked this analogy as it relates to project delivery
(whether it be software development or a consulting project).

It suggests that there is nothing anyone can do to decrease the amount of time
that a baby gestates; but that's quite different from project delivery.

While adding bodies does not necessarily divide the length of time required,
there are absolutely concrete things which can be done to reduce the
timeframe.

You can reduce scope (or features) for starters. A woman doesn't have the
option of delivering a "minimum viable product" of a baby (with only core
features) in less than 9 months, but a consulting engagement could certainly
cut out features to be completed sooner.

Childbirth is a subset of project delivery whose completion dates are not
particularly fungible. There are numerous other types that are.

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michaelpinto
Part of my career has been doing software project management, and it's been
very rare that an end client that I was working for was willing to extend a
deadline or limit the functionality of a project. If a company is run and
backed by software professionals this may happen, but for most other projects
you just aren't allowed to change the rules — which is why the baby analogy
holds so true.

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m0nastic
Right, but here's my problem with that:

I understand that the reason the analogy has become popular is because at some
point, an idiot manager looked at a project plan, saw that the project was
supposed to take (let's say) 6 months, and said "Hey, if we increase the
number of developers from 2 to 6, that means it will only take 2 months."

So I get why it's easy to respond with "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month."

But let's say that instead the project plan said that it was going to take 6
months, and there was 1 developer on the project. It's absolutely likely that
adding an additional number of developers can shave some time off that project
(not inversely proportional to the number of developers you add, and not in
every single circumstance, but I'd argue for the overwhelming majority of
projects).

The analogy suggests that no part of project development can be parallelized,
which to me just seems like shitty management of the project.

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michaelpinto
The problem with the 6 months 1 programmer vs 1 month 6 programmers is that
the minute you have more than one programmer they have to have an architecture
that works together plus take time to communicate with each other — and then
add to that the concept of a "critical path" i.e. that one programmer may not
be able to start something until another programmer is done.

Although in my professional experience the idea of adding more programmers is
always suggested by the client about a week before the project is due!!!

PS If you had to live through about ten of these clients you'd have the same
religious feelings that I do for the Mythical Man Month.

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Stormbringer
Reproduction is an interesting analogy for software development, but like all
metaphors it eventually fails.

For instance there is the change of feature set as pointed out by m0nastic.
Large projects tend to be very flexible in features over their development
life, which is odd because usually its not the end user requirements that are
changing.

Another thing is varying programmer qualities. Some programmers can bang out a
baby in 9 days. Some require 90 months to make the baby (hint: don't whinge
about your hiring praxctices, man up and get rid of these ones). Some are
completely infertile (fire these ones with extreme prejudice). Some project a
field of radiation that will not only prevent themselves from making the baby,
but will kill all babies in a 5 mile radius (do the world a favour: take these
ones out back and shoot them, and then burn the body - _do not promote them to
management!_ ).

Continuing the reproduction metaphor, Yak Shaving can be considered similar to
Onanism. While some people might not be able to make babies, they might be
master craftsmen when it comes to building cribs. Some people might be bad
programmers but really good at changing nappies... without these people you
will be buried in a mountain of... 'cruft'. :D

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ajdecon
More correct (if less vivid): see Amdahl's Law.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law>)

Most activities can only be made partly parallel. The rest must be serial;
that is, will depend on steps done before, and cannot be made faster by
breaking it up for more workers. If a task is 90% parallelizable, and you
multiply the number of workers by 9, you only get a speedup of 5. If you
multiply the number of workers by 100... you still only get about 9 times
faster. :-)

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duck
Probably some credit for the title and article goes here?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364648>

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torme
No, it's actually been around much longer than that:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookss_law>

Not even sure if that's the origin of the phrase.

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Imagenuity
Corrected link for the lazy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_law>

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michaelpinto
As a non-programmer The Mythical Man Month was perhaps one of the best books
I've ever read to understand how to manage programmers, and how to explain to
non-programmers how things work.

If your goal is feature poor and bug filled software then you can ignore this
advice — but if you want to manage a large scale project with multiple
programmers this advice still works today.

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nivertech
Amdahl's law [1] in layman terms: "9 women cannot make a baby in one month."

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law>

source: <http://twitter.com/#!/nivertech/status/51643148253933568>

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d2
This is completely brilliant. Mark Suster is rapidly becoming my favorite VC
blogger.

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joeguilmette
the analogy doesn't really work... because 9 women can make 9 babies in 9
months.

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maxharris
This is not the same thing. What if you have a pressing need for the result in
one month, and you don't care about getting more later?

Edit: for example, if you're trying to make a phone call, what good is having
a high transmission rate if it means that you also have high latency?

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erik_p
... no but it'd be fun to watch them try.

