Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice.

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

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

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.