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The Mythical Man Month
''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'' is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project—involved in writing an ALGOL compiler—would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mothman
In West Virginia folklore, the Mothman is a humanoid creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967. The first newspaper report was published in the '' Point Pleasant Register'', dated November 16, 1966, titled "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something". The national press soon picked up the reports and helped spread the story across the United States. The source of the legend is believed to have originated from sightings of out-of-migration sandhill cranes or herons. The Mothman was introduced to a wider audience by Gray Barker in 1970, and was later popularized by John Keel in his 1975 book ''The Mothman Prophecies'', claiming that there were supernatural events related to the sightings, and a connection to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. The book was later adapted into a 2002 film, starring Richard Gere. An annual festival in Point Pleasant is devoted to the Mothman legend. History On Novembe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silver Bullet
In folklore, a bullet cast from silver is often one of the few weapons that are effective against a werewolf or witch. The term ''silver bullet'' is also a metaphor for a simple, seemingly magical, solution to a difficult problem: for example, penicillin circa 1930 was a "silver bullet" that allowed doctors to treat and successfully cure many bacterial infections. In folklore Some authors asserted that the idea of the werewolf's supposed vulnerability to silver dates back to the Beast of Gévaudan, a man-eating animal killed by the hunter Jean Chastel in the year 1767. However, the allegations of Chastel purportedly using a gun loaded with silver bullets are derived from a distorted detail based primarily on Henri Pourrat's ''Histoire fidèle de la bête en Gévaudan'' (1946). In this novel, the French writer imagines that the beast was shot thanks to fictitious medals of the Virgin Mary, worn by Jean Chastel in his hat and then melted down to make bullets. An account of a Jämt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Development Books
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). Machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also invoke one of many input or output operations, for example displaying some text on a computer screen; causing state changes which should be visible to the user. The processor executes the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1975 Non-fiction Books
It was also declared the ''International Women's Year'' by the United Nations and the European Architectural Heritage Year by the Council of Europe. Events January * January 1 - Watergate scandal (United States): John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up. * January 2 ** The Federal Rules of Evidence are approved by the United States Congress. ** Bangladesh revolutionary leader Siraj Sikder is killed by police while in custody. ** A bomb blast at Samastipur, Bihar, India, fatally wounds Lalit Narayan Mishra, Minister of Railways. * January 5 – Tasman Bridge disaster: The Tasman Bridge in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, is struck by the bulk ore carrier , killing 12 people. * January 7 – OPEC agrees to raise crude oil prices by 10%. * January 10–February 9 – The flight of ''Soyuz 17'' with the crew of Georgy Grechko and Aleksei Gubarev aboard the ''Salyut 4'' space station. * January 15 – Alvor Agreement: Portugal an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hofstadter%27s Law
Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:''Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid''. 20th anniversary ed., 1999, p. 152. . The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as ''The Mythical Man-Month'' or extreme programming. History In 1979, Hofstadter introduced the law in connection with a discussion of chess-playing computers, which at the time were continually being beaten by top-level human players, despite outpacing humans in depth of analysis. Hofstadter wrote: In 1997, the chess computer Deep Blue Deep Blue may refer to: Film * ''Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'', a 1992 documentary film about Mississippi Delta blues music * Deep Blue (2001 film), ''D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Development Process
In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software development life cycle (SDLC). The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application. Most modern development processes can be vaguely described as agile. Other methodologies include waterfall, prototyping, iterative and incremental development, spiral development, rapid application development, and extreme programming. A life-cycle "model" is sometimes considered a more general term for a category of methodologies and a software development "process" a more specific term to refer to a specific process chosen by a specific organization. For example, there are many specific software development processes that fit the spiral ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Productive Projects And Teams
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity (including those that are not defined as ratios of output to input) and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and/or data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related (directly or indirectly) to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity. Productivity is a crucial factor in the production performance of firms and nations. Increasing national productivit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Code Refactoring
In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structure, and/or implementation of the software (its '' non-functional'' attributes), while preserving its functionality. Potential advantages of refactoring may include improved code readability and reduced complexity; these can improve the source codes maintainability and create a simpler, cleaner, or more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility. Another potential goal for refactoring is improved performance; software engineers face an ongoing challenge to write programs that perform faster or use less memory. Typically, refactoring applies a series of standardized basic ''micro-refactorings'', each of which is (usually) a tiny change in a computer program's source code that either preserves the behavior of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anti-pattern
An anti-pattern in software engineering, project management, and business processes is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. The term, coined in 1995 by computer programmer Andrew Koenig (programmer), Andrew Koenig, was inspired by the book ''Design Patterns (book), Design Patterns'' (which highlights a number of design patterns in software development that its authors considered to be highly reliable and effective) and first published in his article in the ''Journal of Object-Oriented Programming''. A further paper in 1996 presented by Michael Ackroyd at the Object World West Conference also documented anti-patterns. It was, however, the 1998 book ''AntiPatterns'' that both popularized the idea and extended its scope beyond the field of software design to include software architecture and project management. Other authors have extended it further since to encompass environmental/organizational/cultural anti-pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commercial Off-the-shelf
Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged or canned (ready-made) hardware or software, which are adapted aftermarket to the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of custom-made, or bespoke, solutions. A related term, Mil-COTS, refers to COTS products for use by the U.S. military. In the context of the U.S. government, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) has defined "COTS" as a formal term for commercial items, including services, available in the commercial marketplace that can be bought and used under government contract. For example, Microsoft is a COTS software provider. Goods and construction materials may qualify as COTS but bulk cargo does not. Services associated with the commercial items may also qualify as COTS, including installation services, training services, and cloud services. COTS purchases are alternatives to custom software or one-off developments – government-funded dev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Programming Product
Software as a product (SaaP, also programming product, software product) is a product, software, which is made to be sold to users, and users pay for licence which allows them to use it, in contrast to SaaS, where users buy subscription and where the software is centrally hosted. One example of software as a product has historically been Microsoft Office, which has traditionally been distributed as a file package using CD-ROM or other physical media or is downloaded over network. Office 365, on the other hand, is an example of SaaS, where a monthly subscription is required. Development effort estimation In the book The Mythical Man-Month Fred Brooks tells that when estimating project times, it should be remembered that programming products (which can be sold to paying customers) are three times as hard to write as simple independent in-house programs, because requirement to work on different situations, which increases testing efforts and as a documentation. See also * The Myt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
99 Bottles Of Beer
"99 Bottles of Beer" or "100 Bottles of Pop on the Wall" is a song dating to the mid-20th century. It is a traditional reverse counting song in both the United States and Canada. It is popular to sing on road trips, as it has a very repetitive format which is easy to memorize and can take a long time when families sing. In particular, the song is often sung by children on long school bus trips, such as class field trips, or on Scout or Girl Guide outings. Lyrics The song's lyrics are as follows, with mathematical values substituted: (n) bottles of beer on the wall. (n) bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, (n-1) bottles of beer on the wall. (caution: this mathematical formula ends with n=1, the song does not use negative numbers). Alternative line: If one of those bottles should happen to fall, 98 bottles of beer on the wall... The same verse is repeated, each time with one bottle fewer, until there is none left. Variations on the last verse following the las ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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