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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.

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
Needs
Tables
Obvious
Continue
Usually
Shall
Show
Shows
Mystified
Need
Conceal

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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.
Fred Brooks
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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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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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...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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
Fred Brooks
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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
Fred Brooks
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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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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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Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
Fred Brooks
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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
Fred Brooks
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
Fred Brooks