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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

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
Consideration
Integrity
Design
System
Important
Conceptual
Programming

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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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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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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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 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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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 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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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