I'm no rocket scientist. I don't know much about the business of making rockets.

Sean Duffy decided to open up the contract for getting the US back to the moon. His reasoning was that SpaceX was behind schedule.

To me, this move seems idiotic. Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month pointed out a mistake that people who manage software engineering projects tend to commit: if a project is behind schedule, they add more engineers to the project, hoping to thereby reduce the development time. However, Brooks has argued that adding more engineers just creates more communication problems and delays the project further.

(Here's an illustration. Let's say it takes 10 hours for one painter to paint some rooms of a house. It is reasonable to think that two painters working at the same rate will get it done in 5 hours. Maybe you can extend this to 10 painters to do it in one hour. The coordination overhead is probably going to push this a bit longer than one hour. However, to think that 100 painters are going to be able to reduce the required time to 0.1 hours is pure nonsense. They'd be tripping over each other. The more workers you have, the more coordination overhead you have to deal with.)

It seems to me that Sean Duffy is completely ignoring the lesson that Fred Brooks gave us. Yes, SpaceX is behind... but how on Earth is giving the contract to someone else going to magically solve the problem? Duffy is not merely asking that more engineers be added to the project. He's going to completely change who works on the project. As far as I see it, this is worse than just adding engineers.

I can see the other contractors making promises now, and then, down the road, declare that they need more time. Is whoever is in charge of NASA going to want to change who gets the contract again????

(For the record, I wish that all of Musk's companies go bankrupt, including SpaceX. Still, this looks like a stupid move if what you want is to get to the moon as fast as possible.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

#USNews #NASA #SeanDuffy #SpaceX #ElonMusk #FredBrooks #TheMythicalManMonth

#20books20days 10/20

> 20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just book covers (don't forget the alt text).

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/8281e4c9-703d-4719-a17a-f82943857f2f

#Bookstodon #TheMythicalManMonth #FrederickPBrooksJr

» But his advice is one I often repeat to my students:
take a sheet of paper, divide it into two columns, and as objectively as you can list the pluses and minuses of each place.
Then sleep on it and in the morning go with your gut feeling.«

In Memoriam: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
—Personal Recollections @SteveBellovin

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2022-11/2022-11-18.html

#TheMythicalManMonth
#RequirementsEngineering
#SoftwareEngineering
#DistributedSystems
#SystemsSafety
#SoftwareCraft