Fred Brooks Quotes

Frederick Phillips "Fred" 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. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. April 1931

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No Silver Bullet
Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks: 20   quotes 0   likes

Famous Fred Brooks Quotes

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

Page 64.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Fred Brooks Quotes

“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

Page 17, cf. Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

“Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.”

As quoted in Quoted Often, Followed Rarely, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/12/8363107/index.htm;About the 1975 The Mythical Man-Month.

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

Page 153 (italics and ellipsis in source).
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

“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.”

Source: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995), Pp. 102–3.

“Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

Page 25 (italics in source, bold added).
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c0_Lzb1CJw#t=01h19m00s
"The IBM System/360 Revolution"
recorded by the Computer History Museum
April 7, 2004.

“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.”

Brooks (1975, Chapter 9) as quoted in Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, by Steve C. McConnell

“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.”

Page 116 (italics in source).
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

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