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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
Much
Complete
Specifications
Program
Arriving
Essence
Programming
Building
Software
Learning
Consistent
Fact
Task
Facts
Hardest
Specification
Part
Tasks
Debugging
More quotes by Fred Brooks
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.
Fred Brooks
Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.
Fred Brooks
Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks
Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
Fred Brooks
A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.
Fred Brooks
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
Fred Brooks
Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
Fred Brooks
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
Fred Brooks
Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Fred Brooks
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
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
Fred Brooks
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
Fred Brooks
Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
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
Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks
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
...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
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Fred Brooks
I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
Fred Brooks
