79 Quotes by Fred Brooks

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

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

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties; for the media are not "ours" in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.

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

Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.

Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice.

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.