Quote

Predictability and great design are not friends.

Fred Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Design
Friends
Great
Predictability

More quotes by Fred Brooks

Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
Fred Brooks
Image
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
Fred Brooks
Image
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Fred Brooks
Image
I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
Fred Brooks
Image
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
Fred Brooks
Image
Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Fred Brooks