Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

Successful software always gets changed.

Fred Brooks

A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

Donald Knuth

Prioritize specific business goals, customers, and users, and then their goals, before prioritizing features.

Jeff Patton

Viable means successful for a specific business strategy, target customers, and users.

Jeff Patton

Keep the progress and quality visible to stakeholders inside your organisation.

Jeff Patton

Great art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

The best product owners help their entire team take ownership of the product.

Jeff Patton

Scope doesn't creep; understanding grows.

Jeff Patton

It turns out that the name you give something matters.

Jeff Patton

Minimize output, and maximize outcome and impact.

Jeff Patton

Shared documents aren't shared understanding.

Jeff Patton

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard P. Feynman

To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and inside of the human body—both go together, they can't be separated.

Jean-Luc Godard

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Samuel Johnson

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Mark Twain

Don't tell me how it works, tell me how to use it.

A customer

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

Yogi Berra

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.

Deborah Tannen

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler

The goal is not physical closeness between people, the goal is mental closeness.

Jurgen Appelo

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

W. Edwards Deming

A successful team is one that is made up of individuals that are able to set themselves aside.

Mark Lauren

If you want to go fast…go alone. If you want to go far…go together.

African Proverb

You must be the change you want to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

You should name a variable using the same care with which you name a first-born child.

James O. Coplien

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Mark Twain. The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.

Albert Einstein

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection ... except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.

David Wheeler (first part), Kevlin Henney (corollary)

Make sure to be passionate about whatever it is you get into, because otherwise you won't put the right amount of work into it.

Jack Andraka

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

Donella Meadows

Delivery plans should be more about options that could be explored instead of scope that is nailed down by commitment.

Gojko Adzic

You should automate as much as you possibly can.

Jez Humble, David Farley

Many consider CI without automated, continuous testing not to be CI. We couldn't agree more.

Paul Duvall

One of the interesting things about Continuous Integration is how often people are surprised by the impact that it has.

Martin Fowler

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Bill Gates

When you have to stop and define what it means to be Agile and argue what flavor of Agile you are, you just stopped being Agile.

James Whittaker, Jason Arbon and Jeff Carollo

Whether it is the build and release procedure, code review paperwork, or any other recurring task on the project, it has to be automatic.

Andrew Hunt

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant but has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein

If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself.

Albert Einstein

Quality is value to some person.

Gerald M. Weinberg

Arguments over style are pointless. There should be a style guide, and you should follow it.

Rebecca Murphey

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Helmuth von Moltke

If you do it more than twice, script it!

Randy Shoup

Reuse costs, for a start.

Adam Bien

To keep up, there is no need to work more, but more clever.

Mike Clark

Automation also reduces the need for documentation.

Mike Clark

Agility demands a high quality and professionalism of all participants, though.

Gernot Starke

Documentation must be aligned with specific project needs, not with rigid predetermined result types.

Gernot Starke

Paper is better in remembering than your brain.

Gernot Starke

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Charles Darwin

Managers are able to work on average of only five minutes between interruptions.

Charles Hobbs

All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed.

Rick Waldron

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Donald Knuth

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

Eric Ries

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code.

Robert C. Martin

’Law of Triviality: The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

C. Northcote Parkinson

If it hurts do it more often.

Martin Fowler

There are 3 rules to follow when parallelizing large codes. Unfortunately, no one knows what these rules are.

W. Somerset Maugham and Gary Montry

Sixty-four percent of the features included are rarely or never used.

Jim Johnson

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection …Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.

David Wheeler

I have never been forced to accept compromises, but I have willingly accepted constraints.

Charles Eames

Legacy code is simply code without tests.

Michael Feathers

Code without tests is bad code. It doesn't matter how well written it is, it doesn't matter how pretty or object-orientated or well-encapsulated it is. With tests, we can change the behavior of our code quickly and verifiably.

Michael Feathers

These little code fragments that you call "unit tests" are actually usage examples of code that doesn't exist yet.

Dan North

There are two ways of reading what someone says. One is to think and try to grok it. Other is to try to find a bug in it.

Ron Jeffries

You cannot control what you cannot measure.

Tom DeMarco

One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that the professional programmer understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.

Tim Ottinger

The better the communication and collaboration within a software development team, the greater your chance of success.

Scott Ambler

The cleaner your design, the less documentation you require.

Scott Ambler

Truth can only be found in one place: the code.

Robert C. Martin

The name of a variable, function, or class, should answer all the big questions. It should tell you why it exists, what it does, and how it is used.

Robert C. Martin

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express requirements.

Robert C. Martin

Indeed, isn't continuous improvement an intrinsic part of professionalism?

Robert C. Martin

Names in software are 90 percent of what makes software readable.

Robert C. Martin

Practice TDD and never let it go. When you write code, write the best code you can. Never succumb to the temptation to rush. The only way to go fast, is to go well!

Robert C. Martin

Comments are, at best, a necessary evil.

Robert C. Martin

The older a comment is, and the farther away it is from the code it describes, the more likely it is to be just plain wrong.

Robert C. Martin

When the code is a mess, the product is mess.

Robert C. Martin

Bad schedules can be fixed, bad requirements can be redefined, bad team dynamics can solved, but bad code stays.

Robert C. Martin

The parts we ignore are where the bugs will hide.

Robert C. Martin

In my experience, less than 50 percent of designed interfaces remain stable during the implementation phase.

Nicolai M. Josuttis

You can't put enough effort into developing your ESB's ability to support logging and monitoring.

Nicolai M. Josuttis

Optimizing to avoid doing things repeatedly is the best approach for achieving excellence.

Nicolai M. Josuttis

You don't share or don't mutate.

Neal Gafter

Planning is everything. Plans are nothing.

Helmuth Graf von Moltke

Legacy code is simply code without tests.

Michael Feathers

If you look at how most programmers spend their time, you'll find that writing code is actually a small fraction.

Martin Fowler

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Albert Einstein

To measure is to know.

James Clerk Macwell

Neither architecture nor clean code insist on perfection, only on honesty and doing things the best we can. In Scrum, we make everything visible. We are honest about the state of our code because code is never perfect.

James O. Coplien

Quality is the result of a million selfless acts of care - not just of any great method that descends from the heavens.

James O. Coplien

In software, 80% or more of what we do is quaintly called 'maintenance': the act of repair.

James O. Coplien

We should view our code as the beautiful articulation of noble efforts of design - design as a process, not a static endpoint.

James O. Coplien

Writing good test code is hard, and maintaining obtuse test code is even harder.

Gerard Meszaros

Rather than a diagram annotated with text, I write a text document illustrated with selective and simplified diagrams.

Eric Evans. Domain-Driven Design

It takes fastidiousness to write code that doesn't just do the right thing but also says the right thing.

Eric Evans

But making written documents that actually help the team produce good software is a challenge.

Eric Evans

A bidirectional association means that both objects can be understood only together.

Eric Evans

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Automation will give you back something you don't have enough of: time.

Mike Clark. Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications

Write your code well so that you do not impede yourself later. The only way to go fast is to go well.

Robert C. Martin

Successful programs not only offer clear documentation but they also recognize that developers don't have a lot of time (or inclination) to sit down and read it.

Daniel Jacobson, Greg Brail, Dan Woods. APIs: A Strategy Guide

Even a whiteboard diagram, or a CRC card, is documentation: the goal isn't to avoid documentation, but to document just the right things in just the right amount.

James O. Coplien. Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

Documenting repeatable processes for anything you will do more than once is essential to your sanity.

Rob Walling, Mike Taber. Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup

The cleaner your design, the less documentation you require.

Scott W. Ambler, Pramod J. Sadalage. Refactoring Databases

XP is designed to use face to face human communication in place of written documentation wherever possible. Effective conversation is faster and more effective than written documentation. When you bring people together, they need less paperwork.

Ron Jeffries. Essential XP: Documentation

Documentation represents potential profit, rather than a cost, because it's not a finely crafted mess of marketing jargon — documentation is legitimately useful from a developer's perspective. As such, it can help you build and sustain communities!

Stephen O'Grady. The New Kingmakers

Intuitiveness does have limitations, however; that’s when developers need documentation. [...] Reading documentation is a last stop rather than a first stop for many.

Daniel Jacobson, Greg Brail, Dan Woods. APIs: A Strategy Guide

You can't control outcomes, just processes.

Tom Griffiths. 3 ways to make better decisions — by thinking like a computer