…you don’t want to start product development with everything designed up front. Your concept of what the new system will look like will be wrong in some minor ways you can’t possibly foresee.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

the ultimate unit test is whether or not users want to use your application. All the other tests you write are totally irrelevant until you can get that one to pass.

— Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Effective Programming

Sometimes failure is just failure, nothing more. We do not always ‘turn a new leaf’, ‘understand that everything happens for a reason’, or extract that ever-evanescent ‘silver lining’. We can learn that some demands are unreasonable, that our world and ourselves are ridden with cracks, and that there is a fundamental precariousness in all expectations of success.

— Costica Bradatan, In Praise of Failure

Before the program manager can be worth anything to the team, he or she must be thoroughly disabused of the notion that he or she has any direct control. –Jim McCarthy…

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in it—everything would turn into an endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Brothers Karamazov