“ The number of months of a project depends upon its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends upon the number of independent subtasks. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to d… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Power tools for the mind. The most dramatic way to improve the productivity of management information systems (MIS) programmers is to go down to your local computer store and buy off the shelf what th… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking cotton; it i… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ I do not believe we will find the magic here. Program verification is a very powerful concept, and it will be very important for such things as secure operating system kernels. The technology does not… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ 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.… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, cre… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Cosgrove has perceptively pointed out that the programmer delivers satisfaction of a user need rather than any tangible product. And both the actual need and the user's perception of that need will ch… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ It sprang from a conviction that the quality of the people on a project, and their organization and management, are much more important factors in success than are the tools they use or the technical… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are b… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ The success of the scaling-up process depends upon the fact that the conceptual integrity of each piece has been radically improved—that the number of minds determining the design has been divided by… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ The manual, or written specification, is a necessary tool, though not a sufficient one. The manual is the external specification of the product. It describes and prescribes every detail of what the us… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ The computer has brought a similar fluidity to many other media: artistic drawings, building plans, mechanical drawings, musical compositions, photographs, video sequences, slide presentations, multim… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ 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 subsi… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Organizations must be designed around the people available; not people fitted into pure-theory organizations. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Indeed, the cost-performance ratio of the product will depend most heavily on the implementer, just as ease of use depends most heavily on the architect. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Even at a cost of $100,000, a purchased piece of software is costing only about as much as one programmer-year. And delivery is immediate! Immediate at least for products that really exist, products w… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
“ Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people build; they have very large numbers of states. This makes conceiving, describing, and testing them hard. Software systems have ord… Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
