The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist

Frederick P. Brooks

Tags:

software design

software development

The hardest part of design is deciding what to design.

Clearly, it is the necessity for contracts, whether within an organization or between organizations, that forces the too-early binding of goals, requirements, constraints. Everyone recognizes the fact that these must later be changed.

I strongly believe the way forward is to embrace and develop the Spiral Model. I would suggest punctuating the spiral with explicit contracting points, augmented with clear specification of what can be contracted, with what certainties, and with what explicit distribution of risk.

"There isn’t one. No one person understands it all." I knew then that the project was doomed—the system would collapse of its own weight.

One of the most striking 20th-century developments in the design disciplines has been the progressive divorce of the designer from both the implementer and the user.