Full relevant snippet: (before the submission was renamed, its title was "Coding is not allowed to start before seventy percent of the scheduled time has elaps

Full relevant snippet: (before the submission was renamed, its title was "Coding is not allowed to start before seventy percent of the scheduled time has elapsed") --- van Vlissingen: In practice it often appears that pressures of production reward clever programming over good programming: how are we progressing in making the case that good programming is also cost effective? Dijkstra: Well, it has been said over and over again that the tremendous cost of programming is caused by the fact that it is done by cheap labor, which makes it very expensive, and secondly that people rush into coding. One of the things people learn in colleges nowadays is to think first; that makes the development more cost effective. I know of at least one software house in France, and there may be more because this story is already a number of years old, where it is a firm rule of the house, that for whatever software they are committed to deliver, coding is not allowed to start before seventy percent of the scheduled time has elapsed. So if after nine months a project team reports to their boss that they want to start coding, he will ask: "Are you sure there is nothing else to do?" If they say yes, they will be told that the product will ship in three months. That company is highly successful.