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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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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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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
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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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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