Resources by chapter

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

The practices speak for themselves when you stop evangelising and start embodying them.

— Georgina Giannoukou, Software Engineer

Think big, act small, fail fast, learn rapidly.

— Mary Poppendieck

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

— W. Edwards Deming

In product development, our greatest waste is not unproductive engineers, but work products sitting idle in process queues.

— Donald G. Reinertsen

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent'.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

— Alan Perlis

The only way to go fast over the long term is to go well.

— J.B. Rainsberger

There's no cheaper software than the software you don't build.

— Ronny Ancorini

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

— Agile Manifesto

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The biggest cause of failure in software-intensive systems is not technical failure; it's building the wrong thing.

— Mary Poppendieck

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

— Agile Manifesto

The goal of software delivery is to minimize the lead time to business impact. Everything else is detail.

— Dan North

The only way it's all going to go according to plan is if you don't learn anything.

— Kent Beck

A mature organization focuses on learning effectively and empowers the people who do the work to make decisions.

— Mary Poppendieck

There are few endeavors in which it is more important to keep options open than in software development.

— Mary Poppendieck

Iteration is not rework. Rework is when you mess something up and have to fix it or do it over. Iteration is when you make something work, and then add functionality. Rework is waste. Iteration is progress.

— Tim Ottinger

For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change.

— Kent Beck

Shipping is the heartbeat of your company. Shipping new code should be as small, as common, as regular, as boring as unremarkable as a heartbeat.

— Charity Majors

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.

— Mario Andretti

The goal of continuous delivery is to make it safe and economic to work in small batches. This in turn leads to shorter lead times, higher quality, and lower costs.

— Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly, Lean Enterprise

If you can't trust the people you hire to get the work done, you have to either get better at hiring, or at trusting.

— Woody Zuill

Great teams are what make great engineers. So hire people who are good engineers and GREAT teammates.

— Charity Majors

Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Improve the process and build quality into the product in the first place.

— W. Edwards Deming

You can't legislate against failure, but you can focus on fast detection and response.

— Adrian Cockcroft

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

— W. Edwards Deming

High performers understand that they don't have to trade speed for stability or vice versa, because by building quality in they get both.

— Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, Accelerate

The best code is no code at all.

— Jeff Atwood

The fear of deploys is the single largest source of technical debt in almost every technical organization.

— Charity Majors

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

— Aristotle

The whole organization is a quality organization.

— Kent Beck

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

— W. Edwards Deming

It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

— Grace Hopper

Money does not motivate the best people, nor does it bring out the best in people; purpose does.

— Daniel H. Pink

Doing the wrong thing right is not nearly as good as doing the right thing wrong.

— Russell Ackoff

More than 90% of an organization's performance is the result of the system, not the individuals.

— W. Edwards Deming

What is not seen cannot be managed or improved.

— Dominica DeGrandis, Making Work Visible

Your ability to ship code swiftly and safely has less to do with your knowledge of data structures and algorithms, and more to do with the sociotechnical structure around you.

— Charity Majors

You're not here to build software, you're here to change the world.

— Jeff Patton

If you eliminate enough waste, soon you go faster than the people who are just trying to go fast.

— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd ed.

The whole organization is a quality organization.

— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd ed.

The reality is that low-drama 'flow' doesn't look like progress to most people. There aren't the burnouts and the tantrums.

— John Cutler