Brooks's Law: prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project
makes it later" -- a result of the fact that the expected advantage
from splitting development work among N programmers is O(N) (that
is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost
associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2)
(that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred
Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of "The Mythical
Man-Month" (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent
early book on software engineering. The myth in question has been
most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks
established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never
forgotten his advice (though it's not the whole story; see
bazaar); too often, management still does. See also
creationism, second-system effect, optimism.
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