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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
Gets
Learning
Changed
Successful
Always
Programming
Software

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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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.
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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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