Overcoming Brooks' Law
Has your boss ever asked you to speed up your project? After you explain there are not enough hours in the day, more programmers are assigned to your project. Now you can’t even come close to getting your work done; now your teaching the new programmers but watching every line of code they write! It’s classic Brooks’ Law; adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Brooks’ is right for a traditional team, but he never worked on a fully developed agile team implementing Extreme Programming.
Surprisingly, many of the practices of Extreme Programming also help teams overcome Brooks’ Law and actually allow an increase in production through addition of resources. If more software development teams successfully demonstrated this phenomenon, many business sponsors would be interested in supporting Extreme Programming.
My experience on a large, long term project successfully demonstrated that Extreme Programming practices allow adding resources while still increasing the velocity of the project. This experience report shares how our strong team effectively sped up story card completion pleasing the business sponsor and moving the software forward.
Since the session is 30mins it will run in a presentation format, while welcoming questions and open discussion through out.
Attached is my paper that formed from this idea. I have attached it to help clarify my thoughts, but it would be my intention to rework the paper for the agile2008 audience.