CPSC 330 / Fred Brooks on Design
Fred Brooks,
"Is There a Design of Design?" NSF Science of Design Workshop,
November 2003 (3 pp., pdf)
Fred Brooks,
"The Design of Design", video of talk at CMU in 2002, which is an
updated version of his Turing Award lecture (wmv)
summary of Brooks' talk on "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design"
Hardware related
examples of iterative design in the
DG Eagle project
- Wallach (1981)
- "many architectural features of the instruction set were
in fact influenced by the first implementation." (p. 112)
- "Many iterations, some of which followed performance
measurements on an engineering prototype, led finally to
the concept of treating reference bits as a group of 16-bit
(rather than binary) strings. The 16-bit string structure
reduces the page replacement overhead by about 70%. It
is noteworthy that without the alterable RAM based
microsequencer changes of this magnitude could not have
been accomplished so late in the development cycle." (p. 118)
- [following a discussion of the bkpt and pbx instructions:]
"This solution serves as a clear example of how a first
implementation can and will affect instruction set
architecture." (p. 119)
- Blau, Holland, and Keating (1980)
- [following a discussion of memory-register instruction
performance:]
"This discussion illustrates a constraint on the design process:
the expectations of the (microcode) designers as to machine
performance forced the design team to alter the design during
the debug process. The design process thus becomes dynamic
itself. Flexibility in the design, such as the use of PALs,
PROMs (Programmable Read-Only Memory), and writeable control
store makes this methodology feasible." (p. 97)
Software related
web pages that provide an overview of Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month:
other articles by Brooks include: