9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month

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

Also, 9 women can't make a baby at all without a man.<p>So, instead of 9 people with similar abilities, it's better to have 2 people whose abilities complement each other.

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...

I've actually always disliked this analogy as it relates to project delivery (whether it be software development or a consulting project).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Childbirth is a subset of project delivery whose completion dates are not particularly fungible. There are numerous other types that are.

Reproduction is an interesting analogy for software development, but like all metaphors it eventually fails.<p>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.<p>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 - <i>do not promote them to management!</i>).<p>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

More correct (if less vivid): see Amdahl's Law. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law</a>)<p>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. :-)

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

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.<p>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.

Amdahl's law [1] in layman terms: "9 women cannot make a baby in one month."<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law</a><p>source: <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/nivertech/status/51643148253933568" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/nivertech/status/51643148253933568</a>

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

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

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