Related:

• Brooks's Law: prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" -- a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that i
  proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N)....
• econd-system effect: n. (sometimes, more euphoniously
  `second-system syndrome') When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an {elephantine} feature-laden monstrosity....
• econd-system effect n. (sometimes, more euphoniously
  `second-system syndrome') When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity....
• bazaar n.,adj. In 1997, after meditatating on the success of Linux for three yea
  he Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar....
• optimism: n. What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and just before actually discovering the *next* last bug.
  Fred Brooks's book "The Mythical Man-Month" (See "Brooks's Law") contains the following paragraph that describes this extremely well...
• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
  -- F. Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month" Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse execute by two persons and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein....
• cathedral n.,adj. [see bazaar for derivation] The `classical' mode of software engineering long thought to be necessarily implied by Brooks's Law.
  Features small teams, tight project control, and long release intervals....
• optimism n. What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and before discovering the next last bug.
  Fred Brooks's book "The Mythical Man-Month" (See "Brooks's Law") contains the following paragraph that describes this extremely well...
• Mongolian Hordes technique n. [poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy] Development by gang bang.
  Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones (but see bazaar)....