When comparing The Mythical Man-Month vs Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules, the Slant community recommends The Mythical Man-Month for most people. In the question“What are the best books for Developers?” The Mythical Man-Month is ranked 6th while Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose The Mythical Man-Month is:
(That you can't just add people to move faster.)
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Teaches you something counter-intuitive
(That you can't just add people to move faster.)
Pro Shows the value of focus and communication
Pro Covers improving development schedules in detail
The author discusses how haste and unrealistic schedules will negatively impact a project. Causing the deadline to extend well past what it could have, had a realistic time frame been put in place initially.
Pro Focused on implementable lessons
Rather than discuss only the theory behind leadership, and author focuses on providing real examples and lessons that can be applied.
Pro Lists out "Best Practices" to summarize the lessons
This is a large book at 680 pages, so having the lessons summed up is quite beneficial. 27 "Best Practices" are discussed, including the pros and cons of them.
Cons
Con It's showing its age in the proposed solutions and methods
Software development community gathered enough knowledge to have a lot more productive methods.
Con Outdated methodologies
This book was published in 1996 and discusses methodologies that were popular at the time (such as the waterfall model).