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. Fred Brooks More Quotes by Fred Brooks More Quotes From 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 data battle weapons Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them. Fred Brooks design-work requirements design 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.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program. Fred Brooks perfect character thinking 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. Fred Brooks amusing arbitrary comfort System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night. Fred Brooks debugging done night Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice. Fred Brooks community improvement practice 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 data design organization Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement. Fred Brooks Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Fred Brooks bad good judgment experience The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another. Fred Brooks another maintenance chance problem How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time. Fred Brooks day late one-day time
