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