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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

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
Done
Always
Like
Debugging
Chiefly
Astronomy
System
Night

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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