The Mythical Man Month- Chapters 4-6

I think the Empire was a little too effective at
accounting for the Second System Effect.

The Mythical Man Month: Frederick Brooks

Summary:
We're now reading "Aristocracy, Democracy, and System Design", "The Second System Effect", and "Passing The Word".

Aristocracy et al is about the benefits of having a central design team, and how to go about achieving it. I think. Most of the examples within are outdated, and the meanings of terminology have changed so much in past years that I have very little clue what he's talking about. He mentions architecture as the user interface (akin to a clock face), but goes about explaining it in a way thats quasi similar to the current meaning of architecture (internal structuring). The process outlined is inherently waterfall, which may or may not be sensible in the aspect of systems development. Overall he says "systems designed by one person are more consistent then systems designed by one hundred people".

Second System looks at an interesting effect when designing systems. In the first pass of system design it is the designers greatest desire to "Just get it to work so I don't have to go back to food stamps". This leads to certain compromises or design paths that in retrospect aren't that nice. When the designer comes back to design their second system, no longer fearful of entering welfare, they try to integrate all the lessons learned from the first system is the grand, overarching, awesomely powerful successor system. And it doesn't work out too well. The added features don't outweighed by the added complexity and cost to implement.

Passing the Word seems to look at how architects form a single cohesive design, and how that gets passed down to the plebes.


Discussion:
1. Why is this paper interesting or significant?
Second System is an important concept, one that I see in myself (in retrospect), and it is something that would benefit from being more widely known.


2. What are the faults of this work?
It was all written in the last millennium. A lot of whats being talked about was important for the kind of work that was being done back then, but it's since died out. Or, to be more specific, the target population is much smaller today. Are there people documenting the API and architecting Windows or the C# language? Yes. But there aren't a lot relative to everything else, the likelihood any given reader is going to find this relevant has decreased significantly over the years.


3. What is the possible future work extending from this work?
The THIRD SYSTEM!!!!