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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
Shows
Mystified
Need
Conceal
Needs
Tables
Obvious
Continue
Usually
Shall
Show

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Fred Brooks
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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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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
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
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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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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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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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Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.
Fred Brooks
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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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
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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
Fred Brooks
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
Fred Brooks
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks