Quotes from Fred Brooks

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

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

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.

Predictability and great design are not friends.

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

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.

Successful software always gets changed.

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement.

Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

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