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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.

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
Build
Learn
Order
Engineer
Builds
Learns
Engineers
Scientist

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
Fred Brooks
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Fred Brooks
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
Fred Brooks
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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
Fred Brooks
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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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
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
Fred Brooks
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Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
Fred Brooks