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

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

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.

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.