Fred Brooks: Building

Fred Brooks is American computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on building.
Fred Brooks: 40   quotes 0   likes

“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 No Silver Bullet

Page 182 (italics in source).
No Silver Bullet (1986)

Parting

“Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. [… ] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.”

Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet

Page 195.
No Silver Bullet (1986)

Perfection

“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….
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. [… ] 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.”

Fred Brooks

Page 7.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Life , Imagination , Sense , Time

“The "Second System Effect":
An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint.
As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used “next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system.
This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable.
The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."”

Fred Brooks

Page 55.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Confidence , Idea , Time , Parting

“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.”

Fred Brooks

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

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