20+ Tom DeMarco Quotes On Education, World And And Management

Tom DeMarco is an American software engineer and author who has written extensively on software engineering, project management, and software development. He is known for his work on the Theory of Constraints, which is a management philosophy for improving businesses. He is also the author of several books, including The Deadline, Controlling Software Projects, and Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tom DeMarco on leadership, education, world.

Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success. — Tom DeMarco

Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about. — Tom DeMarco

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back. — Tom DeMarco

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment. — Tom DeMarco

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there." — Tom DeMarco

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners. — Tom DeMarco

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it. — Tom DeMarco

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed. — Tom DeMarco

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack. — Tom DeMarco

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. — Tom DeMarco

Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they're secretly threatened by the whole concept. — Tom DeMarco

What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish. — Tom DeMarco

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day. — Tom DeMarco

The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. — Tom DeMarco

The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I'd had this wonderful reference book years ago. — Tom DeMarco

The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value. — Tom DeMarco

First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it. — Tom DeMarco

Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it. — Tom DeMarco

The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional. — Tom DeMarco

You can't control what you can't measure — Tom DeMarco

Life Lessons by Tom DeMarco

1. Tom DeMarco's work emphasizes the importance of communication and collaboration in software engineering, showing that teams can produce better results when they work together.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of taking time to analyze and understand the problem before jumping into a solution, a valuable lesson for any software engineer.
3. Finally, DeMarco's work emphasizes the importance of considering the human element when developing software, as this can have a significant effect on the success of the project.