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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
Average
Design
Move
Moving
Process
Great
Good
Improving

More quotes by Fred Brooks

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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.
Fred Brooks
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Fred Brooks
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
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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
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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
Fred Brooks
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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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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.
Fred Brooks
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Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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...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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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.
Fred Brooks
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Fred Brooks
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Fred Brooks