Laws of Software Engineering

ALT Illustration of Tesler's Law (Conservation of Complexity): Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity that can only be shifted, not eliminated.

ALT Illustration of Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

ALT Illustration of Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

ALT Illustration of YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It): Don't add functionality until it is necessary.

ALT Illustration of The Boy Scout Rule: Leave the code better than you found it.

ALT Illustration of Hyrum's Law: With a sufficient number of API users, all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.

ALT Illustration of Premature Optimization (Knuth's Optimization Principle): Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

ALT Illustration of Conway's Law: organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.