"Testing is a philosophy. You can test the design. You can test the requirements. And you can even design modules to test the modules you are creating." - 
Randy May

"An  extremely  strange,  but  common,  feature  of  many  software  projects  is  that  for long  periods  of  time  during  the  development  process  the  application  is  not  in  a working  state.  In  fact,  most  software  developed  by  large  teams  spends  a  significant proportion  of  its  development  time  in  an  unusable  state.  The  reason  for  this  is easy  to  understand:  Nobody  is  interested  in  trying  to  run  the  whole  application until  it  is  finished." Ref.pend.

Self-organization proceeds from the premise that effective organization is evolved, not designed. It aims to create an environment in which successful divisions of labor and routines not only emerge but also self-adjust in response to environmental changes. This happens because management sets up an environment and encourages rapid evolution toward higher fitness, not because management has mastered the art of planning and monitoring workflows.—
Philip Anderson, The Biology of Business© Copyright Mountain Goat Software

Knuth’s dictum, optimizations should be deferred to the point when it is clear that they are required, deferred until the last responsible moment, and targeted based on runtime application profiling so as to attack bottlenecks in descending order of importance.

Donald Knuth’s famous dictum:

We should forget about small efficiencies, say, about 97% of the time: Premature
optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in
that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such
reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that
code has been identified.

"He inspired us through his passion, his generosity, and the gift of laughter. He will be greatly missed."

RWilliams Apple.com

Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don’t wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.
[Gleik 1992]

“The drive to reduce complexity is at the heart of software development”
[McConnell 2004]