Quote

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

Fred Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Projects
Causes
Gone
Awry
Time
Calendar
Calendars
Combined
Software
Lack

More quotes by Fred Brooks

Image
Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Fred Brooks
Image
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
Fred Brooks
Image
A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks
Image
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
Fred Brooks
Image
Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
Fred Brooks
Image
Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
Image
Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks