Tom DeMarco famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Children #Damage #Analysis
There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Inspiring #Live Life #Way
Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Team #People #Leader
The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I'd had this wonderful reference book years ago.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Art #Book #Average
First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Law #Firsts #Management
The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.
-- Tom DeMarco

#People #Function #Working It
The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Focus #Strive #Projects
Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Quality #Pay #Willing
The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Guarantees #Schedules #Pathology
The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Team #Goal #Purpose
The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Emotional #Fundamentals #Logical
Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Quality #Bugs #Testing
What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Team #People #Leader
Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they're secretly threatened by the whole concept.
-- Tom DeMarco

#Team #Games #Hypocrisy
You can't control what you can't measure
-- Tom DeMarco

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