“How does a project get to be a year late?. . . . One day at a time.” This question and answer begin the text of a chapter in Fred Brooks’s book The Mythical Man-Month. Usually, he writes, “the disaster is due to termites, not tornadoes.”
Brooks based the book on his experience managing the development of OS/360, an operating system at IBM. It was first published in 1975. Its best-known rule is also about lateness: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”