Quote

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.

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
Problems
Reviewing
Information
Explicitly
Action
Distinguish
Problem
Status
Firsts
Boss
First
Managers
Must
Solve
Never
Discipline

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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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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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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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...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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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 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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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