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;….

I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality..

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion ….

Successful software always gets changed..

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the….

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 th….

Nine people can't make a baby in a month..

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build the most important function that software builders do for t….

Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress..

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fac….

Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken..

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time..

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the h….

You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything ….

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For exam….

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time..

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design..

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build..

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whol….