Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks
Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.is an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks has received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth19 April 1931
CountryUnited States of America
Fred Brooks quotes about
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.
Successful software always gets changed.
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.
Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.