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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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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
Facts
Hardest
Specification
Part
Tasks
Debugging
Much
Complete
Specifications
Program
Arriving
Essence
Programming
Building
Software
Learning
Consistent
Fact
Task
More quotes by Fred Brooks
Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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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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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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.
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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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.
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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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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
