Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

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.

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.