Have you involved the project teams in contributing ideas and developing solutions? If you do all this stuff and then hand it to them and expect them to implement it, you’re working at them, not with them. And when you work at people, they have a natural tendency to push back. They’re the folks who have done all the research into the problems they’re working on, so they will have a lot to contribute.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

…in practice master plans fail—because they create totalitarian order, not organic order.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

…much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

In any academic field, there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren’t. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than how important it is for getting good results.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Everything in software changes. The requirements change. The design changes. The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is our inability to cope with change.

— Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained