I once attached these sentences randomly to my email. Seemed a bit bombastic, so I stopped.
(10% of Americans have 73% of the wealth; 40% have as much as Bill Gates.)
(Abstraction is too valuable to waste on features you don't need.)
(A feature list is not a development plan.)
(After a manager leaves, all orphaned projects must fail.)
(A group with shared interest can convince itself of anything.)
(A list of wishes is not a plan.)
(Ambition can rationalize anything.)
(An ambitious group with few duties will invent work for everyone else.)
(An analysis without a recommendation is a waste of time.)
(An unfinished computer program is like an unfinished mathematical proof.)
(A real plan reconciles what is wanted with what is possible.)
(A report without recommendations can justify anything.)
(Bandwagons are only useful for traveling short distances.)
(Be as loyal to your company as your company is to you.)
(Beware the moment that processes become more important than results.)
(Challenge the legitimacy of power.)
(Coherent software development listens to one customer at a time.)
(Colleagues remember. Corporations forget.)
(Convenient misconceptions are rarely discredited.)
(Corporate history is rewritten every three months.)
(Corporations forget policies and reward results.)
(Declining companies are very good at making plans.)
(Do not feel obliged to quote this entire email in your reply.)
(Elitism does not scale well.)
(Ideology rarely contradicts self-interest.)
(If unfinished details were trivial, they would be finished.)
(If you have to fix it later, it's already broken.)
(Ignore a celebrity today.)
(Implementation makes all the difference.)
(Integrated software need not be interdependent.)
(Intellectual property cannot be both.)
(It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair)
(It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code.)
(Make your organization fit your people, not vice versa.)
(Multilingual education should be mandatory.)
(Murphy's law of debugging: you are looking in the wrong place.)
("One dollar, one vote." --unknown)
(Programming rule #1: Make it hard for others to break your code.)
(Programming step #2: Delete code.)
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
(Reorganization is another name for turf war.)
(Reorganizations alternately centralize or decentralize.)
(Reward results rather than plans.)
(Secrecy and insight are incompatible.)
(Software must solve one problem at a time.)
(Software schedules only determine what to do NEXT.)
(Solve a real problem first, package it later, and market it last.)
("Successful complex systems begin as simple systems." --unknown)
(Team members must discover their roles, not fill positions.)
(Tests compel better design.)
(What are we good at? What do customers want? What do we do first?)
(When Continuous Integration works, you've mastered Extreme Programming.)
(XP rule #1: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.")
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Bill Harlan, 2004
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