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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

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
Firsts
First
Right
Even
Omniscient
Time
Programming
Software
Planning
Best

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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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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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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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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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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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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