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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.

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
Color
Difficulties
Media
Judgement
Ideas
Colors
Way
Difficulty
Tend
Blame
Physical
Pride
Implementation

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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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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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...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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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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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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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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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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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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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