Fred Brooks Quotes

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

I kind of 'code-sketch,' where I get started with a project by actually writing the code for it and getting something up on the screen. Then I play around with it and see if it's any fun and change the parts that aren't.

The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.

Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design.

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.

Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

One of the reasons microcomputers progressed so fast is people are willing to accept crashes. It's faster to build something and try it, even if it means you'll have to rebuild later... If you spent too much time building and massaging one vehicle, you don't learn anything.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.

At MakerBot, we joke that if we were engineers we would still be on our first prototype. There's something about just 'Doing it”iteration is a way of engineering.

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

Release early and often.

We're on the brink of the next industrial revolution. Instead of buying things, you can make them on a printer. When you have a 3D printer, you can iterate more - what used to take months, now takes hours.

Organizations want small changes in functionality on a more regular basis. An organization like Flickr deploys a new version of its software every half hour. This is a cycle that feeds on itself.

We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements.

You launch a site, and you see what works, and you continue to make it better.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

Sometimes these challenges naturally select more chefs that can think on their feet very quickly. There are chefs I know who won't put things on the menu unless they've tried it four or five times. So you just naturally select a certain kind of chef, people who maybe don't win a bunch of challenges but they hang around.