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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

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
Software
Project
Projects
Later
Computer
Late
Manpower
Makes
Adding
Programming

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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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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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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties for the media are not ours in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.
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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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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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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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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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