"…well over half of the time you spend working on a project is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think."

“The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.”

“How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time.”

“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

“An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.”

“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 organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one as one learns, he changes the design . Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…”