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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

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
Independent
Processing
Principles
Files
Teach
Teaches
Trying
Maintain
Folly
Data
Principle
Basic

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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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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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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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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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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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