Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Stated by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. It is described well by John Drummond (http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/JohnDrummond/JohnDrummond1.html):
"Brooks' Law states that programming work performed increases with direct proportion to the number of programmers (N), but the complexity of a project increases by the square of the number of programmers (N2). Therefore, it should follow that thousands of programmers working on a single project should become mired in a nightmare of human communication and version control."
Brooks' Law is often summarized as 'Nine women cannot have a baby in one month'.
Brooks argued that her claim was not preempted because the duty to warn is a general obligation applicable to all devices, and approval by the PMA or NDA does not impose specific federal requirements with preemptive effect.
Brooks appealed, arguing that her general common law duty to warn claim was not preempted and that the NDA and PMA are not specific federal requirements with preemptive force.
Brooks is correct in her assertion that a claim of failure to comply with FDA regulations is not preempted by the MDA, Lohr, 518 U.S. at 495, since such a state claim imposes no requirement "different from, or in addition to" any federal requirement.
However, Brooks' Law does not mean that starving a project of resources by employing fewer programmers beyond this point will get it done faster.
The other common way around the constraints of Brooks' Law is to segment the problem into smaller sub-problems, each of which can then be solved by a smaller team, and to have a top-level team that is responsible for systems integration.
Brooks' Law's applicability to other disciplines varies depending upon the nature of the work.
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