It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. (Steve Jobs)

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. (Peter Drucker)

Software developers have more definitions of Done than Eskimos have definitions of snow. (@jurgenappelo)

Führung ist zu wichtig, um sie nur Führungskräften zu überlassen. (Bernd Oestereich)

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. (Peter Drucker)

One of the best ways to develop morals and to increase interest in work is the logical delegation of responsibility. (Cyril Northcote Parkinson)

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. (Tom DeMarco)

If everything is under control, you’re not going fast enough. (Mario Andretti)

Probleme kann man niemals mit derselben Denkweise lösen, durch die sie entstanden sind. (Albert Einstein)

Don’t Panic. (Douglas Adams)

Werte kann man nicht lehren, sondern nur vorleben. (Viktor Frankl)

I don’t believe in magic. I believe in hard work. (Richie McCaw, All Blacks Captain)

You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families. (Jim McCarthy)

Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people. (Tom DeMarco)

Vertrauen ist das Kreditwesen der Kommunikation. (Gerhard Wohland)

Die Illusion, man habe die Vergangenheit verstanden, füttert den Irrglauben, man könne die Zukunft vorhersagen und kontrollieren. (Daniel Kahnemann)

Wenn Du wenig Zeit hast, dann nimm Dir am Anfang viel davon. (Ruth Cohn)

Viele verfolgen hartnäckig den Weg, den sie gewählt haben, aber nur wenige das Ziel. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

We don’t need an accurate document, we need a shared understanding. (Jeff Patton)

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. (Marcus Aurelius)

Start with why. (Simon Sinek)

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence. (Edsger Dijkstra)

Design without code is just a daydream. Code without design is a nightmare. (Assaad Chalhoub, Infered from a japanese proverb)

It’s not the plan that matters, it´s the planning. (Dr. Graeme Edwards)

Projects without clear goals will not achieve their goal clearly. (Tom Gilb)

Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers. (Robert Hummel)

The only way to stop bugs is to kill the tester. (Assaad Chalhoub)

A program is never less than 90% complete, and never more than 95% complete. (Terry Baker)

The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren’t there. (Gordon Bell)

There is no silver bullet. (Frederick P. Brooks)

You can’t control what you can’t measure. (Tom DeMarco)

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed. (Martin Fowler)

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. (Bill Gates)

It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong. (Carveth Read)

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. (Peter Drucker)

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little. (Bertrand Meyer)

Das Problem zu erkennen ist wichtiger als die Lösung zu erkennen, denn die genaue Darstellung des Problems führt zur Lösung. (Albert Einstein)

No one’s life has yet been simplified by a computer. (Ted Nelson)

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. (Brian Foote)

If the date is missed, the schedule was wrong. It doesn’t matter why the date was missed. The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. (DeMarco / Lister)

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

If it is not written down, it does not exist. (Philippe Kruchten)

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.)

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. (Tom Cargill)

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding. (Burt Rutan)

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code. (Ken Thompson)

The major problems of systems work are not so much technological as sociological. (Tom DeMarco)

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. (Alan J. Perlis)

To err is human but to really foul up requires a computer. (Dan Rather)

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. (Donald Knuth)

It’s hard enough to find an error in your code when you’re looking for it; it’s even harder when you’ve assumed your code is error-free. (Steve McConnell)

Costs will migrate out of any activity that is measured more carefully than its neighboring activities. (Tom DeMarco)

No matter what the problem is, it’s always a people problem. (Gerald M. Weinberg)

Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. (Louis Srygley)

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don’t accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash. (Tom DeMarco)

The best thing about R is that it is written by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it is written by statisticians. (Bow Cowgill)

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see. (Winston Churchill)

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic. (Peter F. Drucker)

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. (George E. P. Box)

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. (Abraham H. Maslow)

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. (Winston Churchill)

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. (Abraham Lincoln)

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re unlikely to end up there. (Forrest Gump)

If you don’t actively attack the risks, the risks will actively attack you. (Tom Gilb)

The business of software building isn’t really high-tech at all. It’s most of all a business of talking to each other and writing things down. Those who were making major contributions to the field were more likely to be its best communicators than its best technicians. (Tom DeMarco)

It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe. (Muhammad Ali)

The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time. (DeMarco / Lister)

Conway’s Law: Any organization that designs a system (…) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed. (Tom DeMarco)

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do. (John Carmack)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. (Mark Twain)

It’s not what you don’t know that kills you but what you know that isn’t so. (Tom DeMarco)

It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. (Peter F. Drucker)

The early bird may get the worm, but its the second mouse that gets the cheese. (Jeremy Paxman)

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. (Leonard Henry Courtney)

All projects are iterative – it’s just that some people choose to have the iterations after final delivery. (Author Unknown)

The purpose of analysis is not modeling but understanding. (Sun Tsu)

The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the author. No other mechanisms are known. Programs can’t acquire bugs by sitting around with other buggy programs. (Harlan Mills)

It is far better to improve the effectiveness of testing first than to improve the efficiency of poor testing. Automating chaos just gives faster chaos. (Mark Fewster)

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. (Author Unknown, Edsger Dijkstra?)

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. (Aldous Huxley)

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. (Albert Einstein oder Yogi Berra)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)

Computer system analysis is like child-rearing: you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success. (Tom DeMarco)

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back. (Tom DeMarco)

A goal without a plan is just a wish. (Antoine de SaintExupéry)

Most of the time, multitasking is an illusion. You think you are multitasking, but in reality you’re actually wasting time switching from one task to another. (Bosco Tjan)

The hardest part of design … is keeping features out. (Donald Norman)

Testing is an infinite process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous in order to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous. (James Bach)

If you don’t care about quality, you can meet any other requirement. (Gerald M. Weinberg)

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match. (Bill Bryson)

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. (Martin Golding)

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets. (Alan Cooper)

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. (Douglas Adam)

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account. (Douglas Hofstadter)