Boehm Quotes & Sayings

But honest instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o'er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short in human wit. — Alexander Pope

If a project has not achieved a system architecture, including its rationale, the project should not proceed to full-scale system development. Specifying the architecture as a deliverable enables its use throughout the development and maintenance process. — Barry Boehm

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever. — Michael McKean

I don't want other companies, I want this one,' insisted Seidelmeyer. 'I want all of their revenue and none of their people.'
'None of their people?' echoed Feretti. 'That's good margin. — Ken Goldstein

Agile methods derive much of their agility by relying on the tacit knowledge embodied in the team, rather than writing the knowleadge down in plans. — Barry Boehm

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her — Khaled Hosseini

Some deeper part of me wants to write comical dialogue; I'd be foolish to not follow that impulse. Now I recognize that if there's energy to a section of work, you go where the energy is. It's a living thing, and you just follow it. — Patrick DeWitt

About 90 percent of the downtime comes from, at most, 10 percent of the defects. — Barry Boehm

Because tribal foragers are highly mobile and can easily shift between different communities, authority is almost impossible to impose on the unwilling. And even without that option, males who try to take control of the group - or of the food supply - are often countered by coalitions of other males. This is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm found that - in addition to murder and theft - one of the most commonly punished infractions was "failure to share." Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list. Punishments included public ridicule, shunning, and, finally, "assassination of the culprit by the entire group." A — Sebastian Junger

Stop the life cycle-I want to get off! — Barry Boehm

In 1999, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in Hierarchy in the Forest, which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin's Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street. — Paul Bloom

Agents are probably going to hate me for saying it ... You're not very valuable when you're making $20 million. When you're Mike Trout, making the minimum, you are crazy valuable. My first six years, before I was a free agent, I was very valuable. But there's nothing you can do that can justify a $20 million contract. — Mark Teixeira

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success. — Alvin Toffler

For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved. The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called "self-domestication." Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selectively breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them. — Jonathan Haidt

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul ... because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves. — Ronald Rolheiser

Negotiation builds a team as well as a set of requirements. — Barry Boehm

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry. — Bill Frist

Her voice whispering love soothes him. They'd never done that before. Weren't that type of family. Except now he doesn't know what kind of family they are. What word is it that can define them? What would they call his family in the textbooks? Broken? He comes from a broken home. The Mackees can't be put back together again. There are too many pieces of them missing. — Melina Marchetta

Management Challenges to Implementing Agile Processes in Traditional Development Organizations, — Barry Boehm

It is the same for all men. None of us can escape this shadow of the father, even if that shadow fills us with fear, even if it has no name or face. To be worthy of that man, to prove something to that man, to exorcise the memory of that man from every corner of our life
however it affects us, the shadow of that man cannot be denied. — Kent Nerburn

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. Particularly on large projects, each of the following mismanagement actions has often been responsible for doubling software development costs. — Barry Boehm

Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between the alpha (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That's essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tool and weapon types.30 Once early humans had developed spears, anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language, and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations,31 then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group. — Jonathan Haidt

Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited with improving productivity, reliability, simplicity, and comprehensibility by factors of 5 to 15 over low-level languages such as assembly and C (Brooks 1987, Jones 1998, Boehm 2000). You save time when you don't need to have an awards ceremony every time a C statement does what it's supposed to. — Steve McConnell

There are no miracles because all is a miracle. There is no magic because all is magic." -Llewelyn Powys — Rose Mary Boehm

We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If we impulsively protect ourselves and our children, as the feel-good movement suggests, we deprive them of learning-persistence skills. — Martin Seligman

It's not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls "reverse dominance hierarchies" in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It's uncannily similar to Marx's dream of the "dictatorship of the proletariat.")34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It's a great example of how "innate" refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it's a mistake to look at today's hunter-gatherers and say, "See, that's what human nature really looks like! — Jonathan Haidt

I couldn't live my reputation down - all right then, I'd live up to it. — Polly Adler