"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.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Technology writers from the United StatesTuring Award laureatesComputer scientists from the United StatesSoftware engineers from the United StatesPeople from North Carolina
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Page 55.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Fred Brooks
Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was a computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, most famous for managing the development of IBM's System/360 Computer family hardware and then OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks received a Turing Award in 1999 and many other awards.
20 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Fred Brooks →
Related Quotes
"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won…"
"The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. [&hel…"
"How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time."
"The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the concep…"
"The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structur…"
"…well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and…"
"Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is…"
"Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose."
"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air,…"
"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."