Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.

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.

It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers

Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

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.

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.