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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

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
Method
Chiefly
Difficult
Plausible
Jobs
Derived
Littles
Vigorous
Certified
Little
Supported
Quantitative
Make
Managers
Hunches
Data
Risking
Defense
Estimate

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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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