Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Need
Conceal
Needs
Tables
Obvious
Continue
Usually
Shall
Show
Shows
Mystified

More quotes by Fred Brooks

Image
A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
Fred Brooks
Image
The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture
Fred Brooks
Image
Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
Fred Brooks
Image
Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Fred Brooks
Image
...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
Fred Brooks
Image
Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
Fred Brooks
Image
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
Fred Brooks
Image
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
Image
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
Fred Brooks
Image
Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
Image
Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
Fred Brooks