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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.

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
Development
Productivity
Single
Promises
Technology
Improvement
Either
Simplicity
Within
Technique
Order
Decades
Reliability
Even
Management
Magnitude
Promise
Decade

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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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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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 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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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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