Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

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

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

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

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you - if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers - the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.