Originally published in 1975 and re-released with 4 additional chapters in the 20-years anniversary edition (1995), this book has been referred to so many times over the decades that’s its really a classic of software engineering and project management.

It even has its own WikiPedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month). I won’t go into all the details over there.

One of the key points that the book makes is the notion that by adding more people to an already-late complex software project, you will only make it later. This is due to the fact that tasks in software projects can be highly interrelated and the workers working on these tasks will need to coordinate their work and communicate with other team members to keep making progress. The number of communication channels do not increase linearly with the number of people. It increases according to n(n-1)/2. A team of 5 will need to manage 10 channels. With team of 7, this increases to 21 channels. With 10, this ballons up to 45. This reality has been taken into account in the many of the agile recommendations about team size. For example, the Scrum Guide recommends teams sizes of 10 or fewer people.

This book also popularized the saying “9 women can’t have a baby in 1 month” as a rebute to man-month thinking of some project managers.