What the software development experts say
Fred Brooks:
“Complexity and communication costs rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done rises linearly.”
Steve McConnell:
“Many of the critical insights about rapid development are not code-centric; they’re strategic and philosophical.”
Alistair Cockburn:
“The task on a project is not to try for complete communication but to manage the incompleteness of our communications.”
John Hasler:
“The cost of duplicated work tend to scale sub-quadratically with team size — that is more slowly than the planning and management overhead that would be needed to eliminate them.”
Eric Raymond:
“When complexity goes down, reliability goes up.”
Capers Jones:
“Products with the lowest defect counts also have the shortest schedules.”
Melvin Conway:
“Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structure of these organizations.”
Mary Poppendieck:
“A frozen scope offers little value to the user whose world is changing.”
Bill Curtis:
“In a room full of expert software designers, if any two agree, that’s a majority.”
Edsger Dijkstra:
“The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can absolutely precise.”
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Nice list! I like two more Dijkstra quotes:
“… as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn
to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit,
rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished
by failure.”
-Edsger W. Dijkstra
“The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his
own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility.”
- Edsger Dijkstra (1972)
Also like one I heard from Linus today, although he might not have originated it.
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”