Laws of Software Development

This entry is quoting from BlueFlavor, GlobalNerdy and haacked. Very interesting and worthy-of-remembering laws regarding software development.

• Sturgeon’s Revelation
  
  Ninety percent of everything is crud.
  


• The Peter Principle
  
  In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
  


• Hofstadter’s Law
  
  A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
  


• Murphy’s Law
  
  If anything can go wrong, it will.
  


• Brook’s Law
  
  Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
  
  A corollary:
  The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
  


• Conway’s Law
  
  Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it
  
  Another way of putting it:
  If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler.
  


• Linus’s Law
  
  Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
  
  
• Wirth’s law
  
  Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
  


• Fitt’s Law
  
  Time = a + b log2 ( D / S + 1 )
  
  Which means:
  The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.
  


• Hick’s Law
  
  The time to make a decision is a function of the possible choices he or she has.
  
  Mathematically:
  Time = b log2(n + 1)
  


• Lister’s Law
  
  People under time pressure don’t think faster.
  


• Occam’s Razor
  
  The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.
  


• Hartree’s Law
  
  Whatever the state of a project, the time a project-leader will estimate for completion is constant.
  


• Augustine’s Second Law of Socioscience
  
  For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.
  


• Clarke’s Third Law
  
  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
  


• Dilbert Principle
  
  The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
  


• Joy's Law
  
  smart(employees) = log(employees), or “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
  


• Pesticide Paradox
  
  Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffectual.