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While attending several sessions at SD West 2009, I wrote down several quotes related to software development and Agile that really caught my attention. Here are my favorites. Feel free to add any other great quotes that you might have heard…

Users don’t know what they want until you deliver something they DON’T want… the very act of delivering software helps define what they want. The trick is to deliver something they don’t want as quickly and cheaply as possible so they can figure out what they DO want…
—Gerard Meszaros

Agile is like teenage sex – everybody’s talking about it, not very many people are actually doing it, and most who are doing it aren’t doing it very well
—Quote passed around at a social, author unknown (possibly Gerard Meszaros)

Agile is the art of maximizing work not done.
—Author unknown

Every programmer I’ve interviewed who once moved to automated tests swore never to work without them again. I find this nothing short of astonishing
—Alistair Cockburn

Less unit testing dogma, and more unit testing karma…
—Kevlin Henney

Do I need to brush all my teeth? Nope, only the ones you want to work correctly.
Do I need to test all my code? Nope, only the code you want to work correctly…
—Gerard Meszaros

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users.
—Quote passed around at a social, I believe the original author was Edward Tufte