Parkinson's law Parkinson's law Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization. This law is likely derived from ideal gas law, whereby a gas expands to fit the volume allotted. Articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of the first sentence of an essay published in "The Economist" in 1955 and since republished online, it was reprinted with other essays in the book "Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress" (London, John Murray, 1958). He derived the dictum from his extensive
Robustness principle Robustness principle In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software: The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who wrote in an early specification of TCP: In other words, programs that send messages to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but programs that receive messages should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear. Among programmers, to produce compatible functions, the principle is popularized in the form be contravariant in the input type and covariant in the output type. RFC 1122 (1989)