Author: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Brooks ran the development of IBM's System/360 operating system, watched it fall years behind while adding staff made it later still, and wrote The Mythical Man-Month out of the wreckage. Adding people to a late software project makes it later: that is Brooks's law and it has not stopped being true. No Silver Bullet, added for the anniversary edition, argues that no single technique will ever deliver an order-of-magnitude gain in software productivity, because the difficulty lies in the conceptual structure and not in the typing. He founded the computer science department at North Carolina and took the Turing Award in 1999.