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.

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

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

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.

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

Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.