Related:

• Plan to throw one away. You will anyway. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month
• This, then, is the demythologizing of the man-month.
  The number of months of a project depends on its sequential constraints....
• Quote #661 The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specificatio
  and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification....
• More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
  -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month...
• The management question, therefore, is not WHETHER to build a pilot system and throw it away.
  You WILL do that. The question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or promise to deliver the throwaway to customers....
• Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct because no two parts are alike.
  If they are, we make the two similar parts into a subroutine -- open or closed....
• A little retrospection shows that although many fine
  useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers....
• The tar pit of software engineering will continue to be sticky for a long time to come.
  One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach...
• The Chief Programmer) personally defines the functional and performance specifications, designs the program, codes it, tests it, and writes its documentation.
  .. He needs great talent, ten years experience and considerable systems and applications knowledge, whether in applied mathematics, business data handling, or whatever....