Carolina Quotes
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 the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.

Fred Brooks Carolinian

Source

Page 182 (italics in source).

work
No Silver Bullet (1986)
year
1986

Cite this record

“The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlock…” Fred Brooks. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-D7B607BEB0. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/d7b607beb0

More from Fred Brooks

The "Second System Effect": An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used “next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995), Page 55.

All Fred Brooks quotations