Fred Brooks quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Fred Brooks

Fred Brooks Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Fred Brooks on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

Originality is no excuse for ignorance.

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

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

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

Predictability and great design are not friends.

Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.

Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice.

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

Plan to throw one (implementation) away; you will, anyhow.

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

Successful software always gets changed.

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

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

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

Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.

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

How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time.

When fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.

Product procedure ... must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

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

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

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

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

Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.

Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.

Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.