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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
Even
Omniscient
Time
Programming
Software
Planning
Best
Firsts
First
Right

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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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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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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 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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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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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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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