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Successful software always gets changed.

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
Always
Programming
Software
Gets
Learning
Changed
Successful

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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 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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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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.
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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
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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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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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
Fred Brooks