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

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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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The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture
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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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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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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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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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