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Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

弗雷德里克·布鲁克斯

Lifespan
1931–2022
Nationality
American
Role
Computer scientist and founding figure of software engineering
Books
1

Biography

American computer scientist, born in 1931 and died in 2022. He led the development of IBM System/360 and its OS/360 operating system and is known as the father of the IBM 360; he later founded the computer science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1999. The Mythical Man-Month (1975) introduced Brooks law, conceptual integrity and the second-system effect, and its 1995 addition No Silver Bullet distinguished essential from accidental complexity. Jokingly called the bible of software engineering, it remains among the most cited and most contested classics of software project management.

Central Ideas

  • The man-month is a myth: people and time are not linearly interchangeable
  • Adding manpower to a late project makes it later (Brooks law)
  • Conceptual integrity outranks feature count
  • Essential complexity cannot be removed; there is no silver bullet

Books

Related topics

Computing 计算 Technology 技术 Management 管理 Complexity 复杂性 Systems Thinking 系统思考