01 October 2006

Norman R Augustine - Collected Quotes

Law of Apocalyptic Costing: "Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect so much."  (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Definitive Imprecision: "The weaker the data available upon which to base one's position, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give that data authenticity." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Comprehensive Law of Incomprehensibility: "Profound concepts are often characterized by their difficulty of being understood; therefore persons unfamiliar with Greek or Latin should give intellectual depth to their ideas by utilizing acronyms to a degree more or less proportionate with the lack of sophistication of the ideas being presented." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Insatiable Appetites: "The last 10 percent of the performance sought generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Conservation of Input: "The features incorporated into any system will continue to increase until the unit cost of the system in dollars approximates the Threshold of Intolerance, which is defined as 10^10/N^1.2, where N is the quantity of the item which is to be purchased." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Undiminished Expectations: "It is very expensive to achieve high degrees of unreliability. It Is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Propagation of Misery: "If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

"Big Bang" Theory of Software Development: "Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Universal Agitation: "There are only three kinds of programs which suffer incessant budget tampering: those which are behind schedule, those which are on schedule, and those which used to be ahead of schedule." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Inconstancy of Time: "In a noncompetitive process, time expands to fit the work prescribed." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Second Law of Averages: "One-tenth of the participants produce at least one-third of the output, and increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Unmitigated Optimism: "Any task can be completed In only one-third more time than is currently estimated." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Economic Unipolarity: "The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established development program Is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Coinplicational Simplicity: "Truly simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Limited Liability: "The problem with the acquisition process is that by the time the people at the top are ready for the answer the people at the bottom have forgotten the question" (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983).

Law of Amplification of Agony: "One should expect that the expected can be prevented but that the unexpected should have been expected." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Hardware Belligerency: "Hardware works best when it matters the least." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Analytical Alchemy: "Hiring advisors to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold: your problems into their gold." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Inverse Contributions: "It is true that complex systems may be expensive, but it must be remembered that they don't contribute much." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

Law of Consternation of Energy: "The ubiquitous regulation, created as a management surrogate, takes on a life of its own and exhibits a growth pattern which closely parallels that of selected other living entities observed in nature; most specifically, weeds." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

"Whenever parameters can be quantified, it is usually desirable to do so." (Norman R Augustine, "Augustine's Laws", 1983)

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