Mythical man-months - Essay Example

One of the first problems that existed previously was that any activity was taken up with a sense of over-confident optimism with the belief that nothing could go wrong at all. But, even the biggest of corporations and the most intelligent of people make mistakes. Therefore, the industry experts have devised new techniques for debugging any errors that are encountered. Any occurrence of an error is considered as a risk and under such a scenario, Risk mitigation and monitoring management techniques (RMMM) are adopted.

Under this approach, all possible risks that may arise in the development of the application are identified and they are prioritized according to their impact and efforts are made to eliminate them beforehand or whenever they are encountered. The second deficiency is with estimation of the Cost and effort. Though, the man-month is considered to be a fallacious concept, it is still used in estimation, with the only change being that industry has come up with certain concrete mathematical formulas under different techniques by which the man-months can be estimated and the effort can be calculated.

One major observation in these modern techniques has been that the formulas for these methods has been devised using historical data from previous projects that have been taken up by the industry. Thus, the only limitation in this aspect is that any project may not conform to stay with the historical limits and may go out of range at any time. Thus, it is extremely important to devise concrete techniques even today. Earlier, scheduling the testing stage for any Software project was the most mismanaged aspect and the industry was not particularly concerned about it.

But, today's software products are very specific and in order to satisfy the customer, products are examined in minute detail. For this, the industry uses the concepts of '' and '' testing that uses the approach of enabling the user to assess the product and help the maintenance team to unearth all underlying errors. Even prior to this stage, the Spiral Model of Software development, which is popular in the industry today, is of a cyclic nature, which uses the concept of evolutionary prototyping and constant customer feedback, that minimizes the chances of any errors, thereby ultimately reducing the burden on the testing team.

Today, Large software systems are developed in a planned and systematic manner, which eliminates yesteryear problems of understandability and clarity. Under this approach, complex tasks are broken down into simpler ones and each simple task (that is known as a module) is assigned to a team, wherein each individual solution is then assimilated through proper & preplanned interfaces that connect every individual module hierarchically. Present software is developed in such a manner that there is always scope for adding enhancements and additional features to it.

This is done under the concept of adaptive maintenance. The interesting thing with present SW engineering methodologies has been that such provisions for all possible add-ons are predetermined at the planning stage itself, with a major emphasis on reusability and platform independence. A major difference SW engineering and any other form engineering say in the construction domain is that analysis is much more complex, with some