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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.

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
Design
Move
Moving
Process
Great
Good
Improving
Average

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Fred Brooks
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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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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
Fred Brooks
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
Fred Brooks
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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
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
Fred Brooks
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
Fred Brooks
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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.
Fred Brooks
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Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks