Fred Brooks Quotes

“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

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

Originality is no excuse for ignorance.

— Fred Brooks

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

— Fred Brooks

“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.”

— Fred Brooks

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

“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

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

“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

“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

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

“Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.”

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

“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

“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

“Successful software always gets changed.”

— Fred Brooks

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

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

“The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.”

— Fred Brooks

“Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.”

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

“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

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

— Fred Brooks

A design style is defined by a set of microdecisions. A clear style reflects a consistent set. A clear style may not be a good style; a muddled one never is.

— Fred Brooks

“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

“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

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

“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

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

— Fred Brooks

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

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

— Fred Brooks

Predictability and great design are not friends.

— Fred Brooks

“Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.”

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks