The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.

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

Mediocre design provably wastes the world’s resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.

We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties; for the media are not “ours” in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.

Design work doesn’t just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.

It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers.

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

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.