[Travis McGee]

Throw lots more code writers at it, fast! That’ll fix it!

It’s just as effective as putting nine women in a room to get a baby in one month, or so I’m told.

Who has nine months to wait? We need it NOW!

[Lazamataz]

Curiously, as long as I've been in this field, I've never happened across the nine-women-baby argument. Maybe I have, and just never registered it. But it is very commonly said, people tell me.

Now, there is a counter argument. It goes like this:

"You cannot put nine women in a room and have them produce a baby in a month. But, if you stagger their pregnancies, you can get them to produce a baby a month, starting at the nine-month mark."

This counter-argument speaks to the concept of SCRUM and Agile, in which short cycle deployments are the norm.

[CodeToad]

To write 5 million lines of code of that type is about 1,000 man months just to write it. Toss in the typical government overhead of ‘management’, the endless meetings, document rewrites, etc, and that can easily be 50,000 man months.