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.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

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

Predictability and great design are not friends.

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.

Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.

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