Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.

Of the four project development variables - scope, cost, time and quality - quality isn't really a free variable. The only possible values are "excellent" and "insanely excellent", depending on whether lives are at stake.

Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values.

I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.

I don't like the feeling, but I've got to say that a little fear makes me a more focused, more responsible programmer.

I tell people to start implementing when they are pretty sure there aren't more important stories out there. An iteration's worth of data is worth months of speculation.

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.