Brooks's law

E229843

management aphorism software engineering principle

Brooks's law is the software engineering principle stating that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, highlighting the communication and coordination overhead of large teams.

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All labels observed (2)

Label	Occurrences
Brooks's law canonical	1
Brooks's laws and principles	1

Statements (47)

Predicate	Object
instanceOf	management aphorism ⓘ software engineering principle ⓘ
appliesTo	complex software systems ⓘ large software development teams ⓘ late software projects ⓘ
authorOfFormulation	Fred Brooks ⓘ
category	management principles ⓘ software engineering laws ⓘ
describes	communication overhead in large software teams ⓘ coordination overhead in large software projects ⓘ diminishing returns of adding developers to a project ⓘ effect of team size on software project schedule ⓘ schedule slippage in software projects ⓘ
field	project management ⓘ software engineering ⓘ software project management ⓘ
formulatedIn	The Mythical Man-Month ⓘ
hasCause	increased communication channels between team members ⓘ need to train and onboard new team members ⓘ task partitioning and integration overhead ⓘ
hasEffect	increased project complexity ⓘ project delay ⓘ reduced productivity per developer ⓘ
hasImplication	adding people is not always an effective way to accelerate late projects ⓘ early staffing and planning are critical in software projects ⓘ project managers must consider communication overhead when scaling teams ⓘ
hasLimitation	does not apply when work is highly partitionable ⓘ may not hold for small, modular tasks ⓘ
influenced	agile software development thinking ⓘ software project management practices ⓘ
language	English ⓘ
mainStatement	Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later ⓘ
namedAfter	Fred Brooks ⓘ
notableQuoteForm	Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later ⓘ
oftenSummarizedAs	Nine women can't make a baby in one month ⓘ
publication	The Mythical Man-Month ⓘ
publicationYear	1975 ⓘ
relatedConcept	law of diminishing returns ⓘ surface form: Law of diminishing marginal productivity communication complexity ⓘ coordination cost ⓘ diminishing returns ⓘ man-month ⓘ The Mythical Man-Month ⓘ surface form: mythical man-month project scheduling ⓘ software project estimation ⓘ team scaling ⓘ
statedBy	Fred Brooks ⓘ

How these facts were elicited

The pipeline generated the facts above by prompting gpt-5.1 with this entity's name + description and the instruction below.

Instruction

You are a knowledge base construction expert. Given a subject entity and a description of it, return factual statements that you know for the subject as a JSON list of dictionaries(triples), where keys must be "subject", "predicate" and "object". The number of facts may be very high, between 25 to 50 or more, for very popular subjects. For less popular subjects, the number of facts can be very low, like 5 or 10.

# Requirements
- If you don't know the subject at all, return an empty list.
- If the subject is not a named entity, return an empty list.
- Include at least one triple where predicate is "instanceOf".
- Do not get too wordy.
- Separate several objects into multiple triples with one object.

Input

Subject: Brooks's law
Description of subject: Brooks's law is the software engineering principle stating that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, highlighting the communication and coordination overhead of large teams.

Referenced by (2)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

Fred Brooks → knownFor → Brooks's law ⓘ

Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. → category → Brooks's law ⓘ

this entity surface form: Brooks's laws and principles