Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation.

In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.

Motivation is undoubtedly the single greatest influence on how well people perform. Most productivity studies have found that motivation has a stronger influence on productivity than any other factor.

It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.

It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

The default movement on a software project should be in the direction of taking elements of the software away to make it simpler rather than adding elements to make it more complex.

The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project's outcome; it is to determine whether a project's targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them.