I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back.

Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

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.

Originality is no excuse for ignorance.

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.

Plan to throw one (implementation) away; you will, anyhow.