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

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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 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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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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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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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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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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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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks
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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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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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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