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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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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
Men
Commodity
Task
Tasks
Workers
Communication
Among
Months
Interchangeable
Many
Commodities

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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.
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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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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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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Successful software always gets changed.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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 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 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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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