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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
Many
Bearing
Children
Patience
Nine
Months
Takes
Child
Women
Matter
Assigned

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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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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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