Fred Brooks quotes

Fred Brooks was an American computer scientist and software engineer, renowned for leading the development of IBM's System/360 and for authoring the influential book "The Mythical Man-Month." His contributions helped shape the foundations of modern software engineering and project management. He is remembered for his insights into the challenges of large-scale software development and his lasting impact on the field. Here are 24 of his quotes:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

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

...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

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 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

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

Fred Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Fred Brooks

... the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one [... ] as one learns, he changes the design [... ]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes...

Fred Brooks

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

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. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity [...] because they were designed by different people, rather than by God.

Fred Brooks

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

Fred Brooks

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

Fred Brooks

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

Fred Brooks