Best 63 quotes of Fred Brooks on MyQuotes

Fred Brooks

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    Fred Brooks

    A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

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    Fred Brooks

    A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

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    Fred Brooks

    Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

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    Fred Brooks

    Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

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    Fred Brooks

    A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.

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    Fred Brooks

    All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.

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    Fred Brooks

    An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.

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    Fred Brooks

    A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

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    Fred Brooks

    But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

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    Fred Brooks

    Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

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    Fred Brooks

    Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.

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    Fred Brooks

    Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.

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    Fred Brooks

    Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

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    Fred Brooks

    Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

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    Fred Brooks

    Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

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    Fred Brooks

    I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

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    Fred Brooks

    Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.

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    Fred Brooks

    It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers

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    Fred Brooks

    Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.

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    Fred Brooks

    Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.

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    Fred Brooks

    Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.

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    Fred Brooks

    More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

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    Fred Brooks

    Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

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    Fred Brooks

    Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

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    Fred Brooks

    One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and a God-given humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations.

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    Fred Brooks

    Originality is no excuse for ignorance.

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    Fred Brooks

    Plan to throw one (implementation) away; you will, anyhow.

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    Fred Brooks

    Predictability and great design are not friends.

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    Fred Brooks

    Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice.

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    Fred Brooks

    Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

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    Fred Brooks

    Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

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    Fred Brooks

    Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious.

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    Fred Brooks

    Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.

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    Fred Brooks

    Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.

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    Fred Brooks

    Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.

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    Fred Brooks

    Successful software always gets changed.

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    Fred Brooks

    Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.

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    Fred Brooks

    System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

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    Fred Brooks

    System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

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    Fred Brooks

    Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

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    Fred Brooks

    The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

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    Fred Brooks

    The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.

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    Fred Brooks

    The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built.

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    Fred Brooks

    The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

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    Fred Brooks

    The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.

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    Fred Brooks

    The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts. I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.

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    Fred Brooks

    The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

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    Fred Brooks

    The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back.

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    Fred Brooks

    The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

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    Fred Brooks

    The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.