The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering Literary Elements

Nonfiction, Business Essay Series

United States, mid to late 20th Century, in a software development company

The book is written from a third person limited omniscient perspective.

The overall tone of the book is grim. The author is identifying and describing a serious problem.

The protagonists are the software developers. The primary antagonist is time, or to a lesser extent the supervisors of the people doing the work

The problem, according to the book, is that management tends to underestimate the difficulty of scoping software development projects. They allocate too few resources in terms of time and personnel, they insist on hard deadlines and refuse to reduce the difficulty or complexity of the project, they refuse to compromise or to prioritize features or activities, and when the project inevitably falls behind schedule they attempt to get back on track by adding more people to the task. This doesn't work because of unclear requirements, poor communication, and the fact that software development workers aren't fungible.

There is no climax to the book because there is no narrative arc. The book is a series of collected essays on the subject of software development.

When management insists on a hard deadline, the reader knows the project wil be late.

The author understates the naievete of a project team lead who, having presumably been through management training before or else who has hopefully been a member of a similar team in the past, still believes that the people doing the work are fungible, easily replaceable, and not in need of rest after they burn out.

There are frequent allusions to the Christian Bible. The story of the Tower of Babel figures prominently.

The image of the tar pit is used to describe a situation that consumes everything that touches it.

A complex software project requires more effort than expected to complete it, but adding additional people increases the complexity of what has to be done, and makes the project even bigger and more complex, increasing the number of person-hours required to complete it.

Parallelism does not occur in this book, although allegory is present in the references to the tar pit, the tower of Babel, a surgical team, and a "silver bullet" representing an item that can remove a major obstacle to progress.

"As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own making." The child and the adult are representative of humanity, or at least male humanity, as a whole. Female pronouns do not appear in this book except when quoting a female author such as Dorothy Sayers.

The software developer personifies the creative effort. Notwithstanding the fact that the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, was female (along with the majority of the first NASA programmers), the author chooses to depict computer programmers and software developers as uniformly male. He refers to workers as "men" throughout the book, not just in the title, and every hypothesized role in software development with significant responsibility is described as belonging to a male person.