Fred Brooks

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

"The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not th…"

"How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time."

"A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passion…"

"Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

"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."

"The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence."

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."