The 20 Software Engineering Laws

Most engineers learn these laws the hard way. When you try to rewrite something and it doesn’t deliver, or when a project is already late, adding engineers to the team will just make it fail faster. Sometimes, when you start using a metric to measure progress, the whole team will start trying to manipulate it. Then, six months later, someone mentions a 1975 law that addresses exactly what happened.

I paid a price to learn this, too: I spent half my career learning these lessons the hard way, as many others probably did.