Fred Brooks famous quotes

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 #May

Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
-- Fred Brooks

#Baby #People #Nine

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

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

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

#Jobs #Data #Defense

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
-- Fred Brooks

#Computer #Projects #Software

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

#Order #Scientist

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

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
-- Fred Brooks

#Pilots #Management #Plans

Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.
-- Fred Brooks

#Learning #Scientist #Programming

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

#Patience #Children #Matter

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

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

#Identity #Designer

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

#Thinking #Perfection #Requirements

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
-- Fred Brooks

#Independent #Data #Trying

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

#Air #Media #Creating

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

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.
-- Fred Brooks

#Discipline #Boss #Information

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

#Firsts #Planning #First Time

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

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.
-- Fred Brooks

#Believe #Frustration #Goal

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

#Building #Software #Hardest

Einstein 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

#Comfort #Arbitrary #Amusing

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

#Software #Plans

Successful software always gets changed.
-- Fred Brooks

#Learning #Successful #Programming

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
-- Fred Brooks

#Integrity #Design #Important

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.
-- Fred Brooks

#Design #Mind #Fans

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

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.
-- Fred Brooks

#Essence #Essentials #Abstract

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: [...] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.
-- Fred Brooks

#Believe #Essence #Design

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

#Sea #Two #Three

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

#Jobs #Purpose #Language

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.
-- Fred Brooks

#Data #Battle #Weapons

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

#Data #Organization #Design

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

#Time #Gone #Calendars

The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
-- Fred Brooks

#Character #Thinking #Perfect