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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.

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
Order
Structure
Designers
Best
Approach
Magnitude
Great
Produce
Structures
Differences
Smaller
Study
Produced
Effort
Designer
Less
Faster
Clearer
Shows
Average
Simpler

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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built.
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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 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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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Successful software always gets changed.
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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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 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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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