Quote

Originality is no excuse for ignorance.

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
Originality
Excuse
Ignorance

More quotes by 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
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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
Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks
Image
Successful software always gets changed.
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
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Fred Brooks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.
Fred Brooks
Image
Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
Fred Brooks
Image
Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
Image
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.
Fred Brooks
Image
Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
Fred Brooks
Image
A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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
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