Fred Brooks Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  50 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Baby, People, Nine

  15 Copy quote

• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

  Fred Brooks

  Computer, Projects, Programming

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

  8 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

  6 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Order, Scientist, Engineers

  11 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

  8 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

  20 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Humanity, Software, Complexes

  0 Copy quote

• Successful software always gets changed.

  Fred Brooks

  Learning, Successful, Programming

  3 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Impress, Ifs

  7 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.

  15 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.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Building, Software, Hardest

  9 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

  8 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Moving, Average, Design

  2 Copy quote

• Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

  Fred Brooks

  Abandoned, Dissertation, Finished

  0 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Debugging, Occupation, Astronomy

  14 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Technology, Order, Simplicity

  ""The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition"". Book by Frederick P. Brooks Jr., August 2, 1995.

  3 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

  5 Copy quote

• When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

  Fred Brooks

  Children, Effort, Tasks

  0 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

  9 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

  13 Copy quote

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

  Fred Brooks

  Design, Important, World

  8 Copy quote

• Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

  Fred Brooks

  Thinking, Perfection, Requirements

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

  3 Copy quote

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