Fred Brooks
Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Technology
How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time.
The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.
Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.
The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.Collection: Building
Nine people can't make a baby in a month.Collection: Baby
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it laterCollection: Computer
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.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Believe
A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.Collection: Order
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.Collection: Patience
Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.Collection: Impress
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.Collection: Learning
An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."Collection: Sea
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.Collection: Media
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.Collection: Needs
Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.Collection: Humanity
Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.Collection: Firsts
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.Collection: Thinking
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.Collection: Night
Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.Collection: Design Work
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.Collection: Two
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.Collection: Communication
Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.Collection: Maintenance
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.Collection: Two
Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.Collection: Abandoned
Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.Collection: Design
I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.Collection: Integrity
I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.Collection: Writing
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.Collection: Integrity
Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.Collection: Moving
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 managersCollection: Jobs
Successful software always gets changed.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Beach
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.Collection: Essence
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Believe
Predictability and great design are not friends.Collection: Design
Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.Collection: Design
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.Collection: Pilots
Originality is no excuse for ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Engineering
System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.Collection: Debugging
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.Collection: Average
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.Collection: Character