人月神话业论文外文翻译.docx

附录A 外文文献及其译文 The Mythical Man-Month Good cooking fakes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you. MENU OF RESTAURANT ANTOINE. NEW ORLEANS More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar timethan for all other causes combined. Why is this cause of disaster so common? First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite untrue,i.e., that all will go well. Second, our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable. Third, because we are uncertain of our estimates, software managers often lack the courteous stubbornness of Antoines chef. Fourth, schedule progress is poorly monitored. Techniques proven and routine in other engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations in software engineering. Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster. Schedule monitoring will be the subject of a separate essay.Let us consider other aspects of the problem in more detail. Optimism All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers.Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it ismerely that computers are young, programmers are younger, andthe young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: This time it will surely run, orI just found the last bug. So the first false assumption that underlies the scheduling of systems programming is that all will go well, i.e., that each task will hike only as long as it ought to take. The pervasiveness of optimism among progr