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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
Takes
Child
Women
Matter
Assigned
Many
Bearing
Children
Patience
Nine
Months

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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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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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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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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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