Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks
Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.is an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks has received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth19 April 1931
CountryUnited States of America
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time.
Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.
Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.
Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.
Predictability and great design are not friends.
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.
I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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.
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.
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.