It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake,
but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how
to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The
manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and
I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.
The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could
write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three
more than the schedule allowed. The control program manager had 150 men.
He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the
architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and
he could do it on schedule. Futhermore, if the architecture team did it,
his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months. To this the
architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the
responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be
three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was
right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the
system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it
added a year to debugging time. -- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The
Mythical Man Month"
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