One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can't.

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code

The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing.

So I hope I’ve made clear that imposing agile methods is a very red flag.

One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.