It always takes longer than you expect, even when you
take into account Hofstadter's Law.
— Douglas Hofstadter (Author of Gödel, Escher, Bach:
An Eternal Golden Braid)
Hick's Law
The time to make a decision is a function of the
possible choices he or she has.
— William Edmund Hick
Further Reading
The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less, by Barry
Schwartz (2004)
Brooks's Law
adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
— Fred Brooks (Author of The Mythical
Man-Month)
Miller's Law
All discussions of incremental updates to Bugzilla will
eventually trend towards proposals for large scale
redesigns or feature additions or replacements for
Bugzilla.
— Mike Beltzner
Sturgeon's Law
90% of everthing is crud.
— Theodore Sturgeon
Hanlon's Razor
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
explained by stupidity
— Robert J. Hanlon
SNAFU Principle
Communication is only possible between equals
Ninety-Ninety Rule
"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of
the development time. The remaining 10% of the code
accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
— Tom Cargill of Bell Labs
Murphy's Law
“If there are two or more ways to do something, and one
of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone
will do it.”
Putt's Law
"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those
who understand what they do not manage and those who
manage what they do not understand
— Archibald Putt
Gall's Law
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and
cannot be patched up to make it work."
— John Gall
Greenspun's Tenth Rule
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."