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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
System
Night
Done
Always
Like
Debugging
Chiefly
Astronomy

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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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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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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.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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