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

Fred Brooks

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Fred Brooks
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: April 19
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Mathematician
Software Engineer
University Teacher
Durham
North Carolina
Frederick Phillips Brooks
Jr.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Frederick Phillips Fred Brooks
Jr
Frederick P. Brooks
Frederick Phillips
Children
Patience
Nine
Months
Takes
Child
Women
Matter
Assigned
Many
Bearing

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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.
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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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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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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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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