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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
Causes
Gone
Awry
Time
Calendar
Calendars
Combined
Software
Lack
Projects

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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 basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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.
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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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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties for the media are not ours in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.
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