These laws are part humor and part exaggeration but each has a significant
amount of truth.
| Law | Statement | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| Brook's Law | Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. | Mythical Man-Month, pg. 25 |
| Client Law | You have to keep the client happy | CSC graduate Alex Brodd and many business references |
| Experience Law | The devil isn't smarter; he's just been around longer. | Leon Presser, UCSB Professor |
| Fisher's First Law | Never trust the programmer | Gene Fisher, Cal Poly CSC Dept. |
| Gilb's Law of Unreliability | Any system that depends upon human reliability is unreliable. | Tom Gilb |
| Meeting Law | Meetings are a waste of time | fundamental law of nature |
| Meldal's Law | Trying to be smart is too ambitious. Try not to be stupid. | Sigurd Meldal, Cal Poly Professor |
| Meyer's Law of Documentation |
Avoid documentation. (Code and documentation as separate products will suffer from inconsistency.) |
Bertrand Meyer in Object-Oriented Software Construction, pg. 205 |
| Murphy's Law | If anything can go wrong, it will. | fundamental law of nature |
| New Tool Rule | Don't use new tools on new projects! | Dan Stearns (he probably read it somewhere but forgot ) |
| Nuckles Principle | If I just had one more tool, I'd get nothing done! | Richard Nuckles, retired |
| Second System Effect | Plan to throw [the 1st version] away; you will anyhow. | Mythical Man-month, pg. 116 |
| Users 1st Law | Do what the user wants, not what he says he wants | Chris Buckalew, Cal Poly CSC Department |
| Users 2nd Law | Users change their minds, most often after the system is deployed. | fundamental software engineering law |
| Weiler's Law | Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. | Citation unknown |
| Weinberg's Programmer Laws | If a programmer is indispensable, get rid of him as quickly as possible | Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming, pg. 100 |