Sublime

Even though they have not taken centuries to build, most programming systems reflect conceptual disunity far worse than that of cathedrals. Usually this arises not from a serial succession of master designers, but from the separation of design into many tasks done by many men. I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important considera

Many poor systems come from an attempt to salvage a bad basic design and patch it with all kinds of cosmetic relief. Top-down design reduces the temptation. I am persuaded that top-down design is the most important new programming formalization of the decade.

If one believes, as I have argued at many places in this book, that creativity comes from individuals and not from structures or processes, then a central question facing the software manager is how to design structure and process so as to enhance, rather than inhibit, creativity and initiative. Fortunately, this problem is not peculiar to software

Then one day, one of the developers came in with a Harvard Business Review paper from 1986, written by two Japanese business professors, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. It was titled, “The New New Product Development Game.” Takeuchi and Nonaka had looked at teams from some of the world’s most productive and innovative companies: Honda, Fuji-X