It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers.
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.
Predictability and great design are not friends.
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
Improving your process won’t move you from good to great design. It’ll move you from bad to average.
A design style is defined by a set of microdecisions. A clear style reflects a consistent set. A clear style may not be a good style; a muddled one never is.
We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties; for the media are not “ours” in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.
Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.
Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.
Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.
When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.
Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community’s practice.
Design work doesn’t just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.