Quote

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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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
Must
Fence
Cans
Important
Equally
Fences
Product
Procedure
Products
Procedures
Protect
Crown
Building
Jewels
High
Crowns
Eschew
Around
Garbage
Securely

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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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Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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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 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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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.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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.
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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 scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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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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