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

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There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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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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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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 boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.
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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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