More resources

Let’s add more resources to a project and presto, it goes faster. Or does it? Brooks’s law, which says “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law), makes it pretty clear. And it still holds, almost 50 years later. Why? Because adding new teams comes at a big cost: you have to train these new people or teams. And if you also bring in freelance consultants and/or individual employees who form a new team, that team has to go through a number of phases before it becomes effective: it has to form, storm and mature. All of that takes time, and during that time neither the new team nor the teams around it are fully effective.

Thank you Jimmy, Mattias and Daniel for an interesting discussion on the subject, which contributed to this and some future strips on related topics.