79 Quotes by Fred Brooks

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

Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.

Predictability and great design are not friends.

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

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

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

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.