Brooks's law
E229843
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.
All labels observed (2)
| Label | Occurrences |
|---|---|
| Brooks's law canonical | 1 |
| Brooks's laws and principles | 1 |
How this entity was disambiguated
This entity first appeared as the object of triple T2037683 — resolving that mention is where its identity was fixed. The disambiguator weighed these candidate entities and picked the highlighted one (or “None”, minting a new entity). This is how homonymy is resolved: the same surface form can point to different entities.
NED1
Entity disambiguation (via context triple)
gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
Target entity: Brooks's law Context triple: [Fred Brooks, knownFor, Brooks's law]
-
A.
Linus’s Law
Linus’s Law is the open-source software development principle that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” emphasizing the power of many reviewers to quickly find and fix defects.
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B.
Cunningham's Law
Cunningham's Law is an internet adage stating that the best way to get the right answer online is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.
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C.
Wirth’s law
Wirth’s law is the observation that software tends to become slower more quickly than hardware becomes faster, often negating the benefits of improved computing performance.
-
D.
Kluge's law
Kluge's law is a proposed sound law in Proto-Germanic historical linguistics that explains the development of certain geminate consonants from earlier consonant clusters.
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E.
Amdahl's law
Amdahl's law is a formula in computer architecture and parallel computing that predicts the maximum performance improvement achievable by parallelizing parts of a system, given that some portion must remain serial.
- F. None of above. chosen
- G. Unsure - the case is ambiguous/there is not enough information to decide.
NED2
Entity disambiguation (via description)
gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
Target entity: Brooks's law Target entity description: 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.
-
A.
Linus’s Law
Linus’s Law is the open-source software development principle that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” emphasizing the power of many reviewers to quickly find and fix defects.
-
B.
Cunningham's Law
Cunningham's Law is an internet adage stating that the best way to get the right answer online is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.
-
C.
Wirth’s law
Wirth’s law is the observation that software tends to become slower more quickly than hardware becomes faster, often negating the benefits of improved computing performance.
-
D.
Kluge's law
Kluge's law is a proposed sound law in Proto-Germanic historical linguistics that explains the development of certain geminate consonants from earlier consonant clusters.
-
E.
Amdahl's law
Amdahl's law is a formula in computer architecture and parallel computing that predicts the maximum performance improvement achievable by parallelizing parts of a system, given that some portion must remain serial.
- F. None of above. chosen
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.
this entity surface form:
Brooks's laws and principles