Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you - if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers - the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.