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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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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
Beyond
Mapping
Brain
Renewing
Alone
Intricate
Rich
Protecting
Secret
Imitation
Powerful
Grown
Self
Diversity
Built

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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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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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Successful software always gets changed.
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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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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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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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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