I quote the title from the book Mythical Man-Month written by Fred Brooks and originated from Theodore von Kármán in the unique form “Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month.” Fred Brooks made this a very popular statement in the software industry, with good reasons. The idea behind it is that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, also called Brooks’ Law.
This is a story about where I have seen this happen and what the result became to be.
