I am firmly convinced that the model set forth in this book is by far the best anyone has developed. First proposed by Boehm in 1988, it was even then the fruit of much thought and a rich trove of practical experience. In the almost 30 years since its introduction, the Incremental Commitment Spiral Model has grown and evolved through actual use in many projects, and through systematic thought. It has been extended from software to systems, and to the larger life cycle. (Location 275)

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. author, The Design of Design (Location 289)

Employees working in single domains where one size is enough feel that their solutions ought to work for everybody else. It is even challenging to identify criteria for selecting alternative processes. The organization may have tried changing everyone to a new method and found that it is yet just another Procrustean bed. (Location 504)

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.” —George Santayana (1863–1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1, (Location 523)

successes either. How can we more quickly get projects on a path to success? When are significant up-front investments still necessary for success? How can we provide value to the intended users and stakeholders quickly, no matter how large or complex the system is, and then allow the system to evolve at a pace close to the rate of change in stakeholder needs? (Location 588)

To define success for engineered systems, we rely on Webster’s definition of engineering as “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people [5].” (Location 599)

The definition of systems engineering developed by INCOSE and adopted by the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) is “An interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems (Location 604)

system will succeed if and only if it makes winners of its success-critical stakeholders (Location 613)

Making winners of your success-critical stakeholders requires: 1. Identifying all of the success-critical stakeholders. 2. Understanding how each stakeholder wants to win. 3. Having the success-critical stakeholders negotiate among themselves a win-win set of product and process plans. 4. Controlling progress toward the negotiated win-win realization, including adapting it to change. (Location 624)

The most appropriate user interfaces and collaboration modes for a complex human-intensive system are not specifiable in advance, but rather emerge with usage. Forcing users to specify them precisely in advance of development generally leads to poor business or mission performance and expensive late rework and delays. (Location 684)