“There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.” Brooks continues: “we cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years” in software development, as there is in hardware development. In other words, there will never be an equivalent in software development of Moore’s Law. It is the nature of software systems that they are “more complex than most things people build”. Software systems have a large number of possible states, which makes conceiving, describing, and testing them very hard to do. And, unlike physical products, scaling up is not a matter of producing more of the same thing, but it concerns designing, constructing, and testing entirely new and original components and having them interact seamlessly with existing components.
Worth reading. And yes, mythical man month still holds true 50 years later.
Quote Citation: Kieran Potts, “The Mythical Man-Month at 50”, 28 December 2025, https://kieranpotts.com/mythical-man-month-50