Kent Beck Quotes

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

Everything has to be well thought out - what do you really need, when can you do with less coverage.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

We must strike a balance between speed and thoroughness, between the need for time frames and the avoidance of mistakes which will later cost us dearly.

Throwing money after security turns out to be a classic example of the law of diminishing marginal utility.

There is a cost to every decision, and whether or not you impose a public health order has costs to industry and the public.

If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources.

The cost of assessing risk is now often greater than the cost of failing.

Count the cost first. Don’t pay too big a price for pursuing minor values.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

[Cost-benefit analysis is used:] ... to produce lofty academic-sounding reasons for endless inaction.

I made a cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle.

Armchair generals assume that nations decide on their foreign policy objectives and then subordinate everything else to achieving them. Life is more complicated. Threats, opportunities and risks are always uncertain, but the economic costs of maximum preparedness are definite.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Free enterprise picks investments successfully by running millions of experiments, and the survival of a product depends on its producing more value per dollar of cost than other products do. Competition ruthlessly prunes products that fail to meet this threshold. The public sector works in the opposite way; it undertakes large investment with virtually no competition.

Cost effectiveness and effectiveness are not always the same thing in government.

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

Hawks usually care about benefits; doves most about costs. Neither benefits or costs however are easily estimated in advance.

Careful economic analysis does have one important benefit, which is that it can help kill ideas that are completely logically inconsistent or wildly at variance with the data. This insight covers at least 90 percent of proposed economic policies

The cost of deploying one U. S. soldier is the equivalent to the cost of deploying 70 Afghan soldiers.

I'm not going to risk our precious military resources on an ineffective, unproductive mission.

Applying cost-benefit analysis to regulation is no different than what most regulatory agencies do.

There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my work in finance, government, and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

I've always prided myself on doing what really was best for business.