What Is Brooks' Law?

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It's a law that has proven its weight time and time again in gold, and it's called Brooks's Law and lets us tell you, it's frankly brilliant. If you've worked on a late project, you know that adding more people to the team makes it slower. It makes it go slower. It's not a matter of whether or not you can find these extra resources. It's more about how much work they must do once they get there. When you start with one late project, you aim to get it done by whatever means necessary. Then, as soon as you realize the problem, you begin to worry about how much longer it will take with each new person added to the team. It happens because the new team member takes time to get up to speed, and since the project is late, there is less time to complete it. The longer it takes to complete the project, the later it will be; therefore, the project will have even less time to complete. This Law applies to all types of projects, especially software development. The amount of work accomplished scales non-linearly with the number of people working on a project." The more people you have working on a project, the less work each individual, will do. For example, if you have a team of ten working together on a project, each person will get about 10% of the total work done. If you add an eleventh person, that person will get done even less than the previous 10%, so maybe only 9% of the total work. If you add a twelfth person, that person will get done even less than the previous 9%, so maybe only 8% of the total work. So on.

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Related Terms by Others

Outsourced Product Development (OPD)

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Trending Definitions

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Phishing

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