Kick off your software project as soon as possible

Frederick Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month said that "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging". The implication is in order to meet schedule, we should kick off a software project as soon as possible (perhap before a contract is signed) and within the project we should start as many tasks as possible and at earliest possible time.