Some of the things from my experience..

Wikipedia has a nice summary under “The Mythical Man Month”, published in 1975.

Amazing that nothing changes. Even when the questions have been answered, the way shown back when they were punching Hollerith cards with FORTRAN and COBOL.

I do disagree with a few things (e.g. irreducible number of errors – true only if you don’t refactor and it is an alarm that you need to refactor the code or redesign to fix what is causing the interactions and complexity).

And some things have been widely adopted. The problem is that even good ideas often turn into a liturgy or ritual to be performed – ends in themselves to placate the gods of coding forturne – instead of means to the end of allowing good code to be written.

Rarely is code pure mathematics where you are implementing a well known equation for a clear purpose where bad data cannot occur. It is a creative act – more like architecture in which the building must stand up even in bad weather, but also be functional, and there isn’t just one way to do it. It is something like Jazz – all the music fits and sometimes surprises, but there is no way to specify more than a theme for inspiration.

The second bit of ancient (in internet time) wisdom was DeMarco and Lister’s “PeopleWare” about managing creative teams.

Factories only have economies of scale because they produce identical or nearly identical parts. That doesn’t work since software is never identical, though I can personally estimate fairly accurately from a complete spec where I can get a good insight into the complexity. But resolving it is never doing the same thing twice.

You are 90% feature complete and holding. Every time you add 1%, marketing or some other things changes a different 1%

You have 9 man-months more of work, but they want it in 30 days so they just hired 8 temps (can’t 9 women have 1 baby in 1 month?).

HR, Legal, the accounting department or something else external prevent you from getting and keeping critical people on from the start until the project is finished so you are forced to deal with turnover.

The complex pieces which were going to be coded by the most experienced (and thus expensive) people have been outsourced somewhere 8 or more time-zones away. To the lowest bidder. Your only contact person has a thick accent and no technical knowledge but will scribble down translated versions of your questions and relay answers the next day.

You have to use Outlook, Lotus Notes, or whatever because that is what corporate uses. Including the anti-virus software that isn’t even detecting a virus you can see on TaskManager.

(#2) Refactoring will take too much time so is against the rules – better 1Kloc of crap than 100 lines of clear elegant and bug free code.