Fred Brooks Quotes

Quotes about:

• The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

  Fred Brooks

  Building, Software, Hardest

  13 Copy quote

• Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

  Fred Brooks

  Baby, People, Nine

  27 Copy quote

• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

  Fred Brooks

  Computer, Projects, Programming

  "The Mythical Man-Month," Datamation, Dec. 1974

  12 Copy quote

• A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

  Fred Brooks

  Order, Scientist, Engineers

  16 Copy quote

• The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they have almost never thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified.

  Fred Brooks

  Important, Details, Want

  11 Copy quote

• You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

  Fred Brooks

  Believe, Reality, Faces

  "Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything". Interview with Kevin Kelly, www.wired.com. July 28, 2010.

  56 Copy quote

• How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.

  Fred Brooks

  Procrastination, Years, One Day At A Time

  26 Copy quote

• Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.

  Fred Brooks

  Impress, Ifs

  13 Copy quote

• The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

  Fred Brooks

  Patience, Children, Matter

  "The Mythical Man-Month," Datamation, Dec. 1974

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Learning, Essence, Arriving

  13 Copy quote

• An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."

  Fred Brooks

  Sea, Two, Three

  "The Mythical Man-Month". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.

  13 Copy quote

• Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.

  Fred Brooks

  Humanity, Software, Complexes

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Media, Creating, Air

  "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.

  9 Copy quote

• Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you - if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers - the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

  Fred Brooks

  Thinking, Order, Cds

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Fred Brooks

  Needs, Tables, Obvious

  "The Mythical Man-Month". Book by Fred Brooks, Addison-Wesley, 1995.

  19 Copy quote

• Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.

  Fred Brooks

  Design Work, Design, Requirements

  4 Copy quote

• Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

  Fred Brooks

  Firsts, Planning, Programming

  "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.

  6 Copy quote

• I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.

  Fred Brooks

  Integrity, Quality, Products

  12 Copy quote

• Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

  Fred Brooks

  Maintenance, Delay, Execution

  5 Copy quote

• Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

  Fred Brooks

  Two, Waiting, Choices

  10 Copy quote

• System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

  Fred Brooks

  Night, Debugging, Done

  13 Copy quote

• The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back.

  Fred Brooks

  Two, Maintenance, Fundamentals

  18 Copy quote

• Predictability and great design are not friends.

  Fred Brooks

  Design, Not Friends, Great Design

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Average, Order, Differences

  "No Silver Bullet". Book by Fred Brooks, 1986.

  4 Copy quote

• I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

  Fred Brooks

  Writing, Flow, Program

  9 Copy quote

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