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

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

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

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.

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

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.