Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.
You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.
How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.
System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they have almost never thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified.
Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.
Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.
The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious.
An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."
Successful software always gets changed.
A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.
The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts. I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.
Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.
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.
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