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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
Workers
Communication
Among
Months
Interchangeable
Many
Commodities
Men
Commodity
Task
Tasks

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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 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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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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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...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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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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