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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
Programming
Software
Gets
Learning
Changed
Successful
Always

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
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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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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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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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
Fred Brooks
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks
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It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers
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