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

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.

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

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back.

Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.

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

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.