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

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
Lack
Projects
Causes
Awry
Gone
Calendar
Time
Calendars
Combined
Software

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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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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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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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...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
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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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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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
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks