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.

Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.

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.

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

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.

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