Software Engineering Quotes

We must not forget that the wheel is reinvented so often because it is a very good idea; I've learned to worry more about the soundness of ideas that were invented only once. ~ David Parnas

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today. ~ Fred Brooks

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Quality must be enforced, otherwise it won't happen. We programmers must be required to write tests, otherwise we won't do it. ~ Yegor Bugayenko

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. ~ Fred Brooks

[Software engineering is the] establishment and use of sound engineering principles to obtain economically software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently. ~ Friedrich L. Bauer

If it is not written down, it does not exist. ~ Philippe Kruchten

Working extra hours can hurt team dynamics. Not everyone on the team will have the flexibility to pitch in the extra hours. Perhaps one team member has children at home whom he has to take care of. Maybe someone else has a 2-week trip planned in the upcoming months, or she has to commute a long distance and can't work as many hours. Whereas once the team jelled together and everyone worked fairly and equally, now those who work more hours have to carry the weight of those who can't or don't. The result can be bitterness or resentment between members of a formerly-happy team. ~ Edmond Lau

An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. ~ Bjarne Stroustrup

To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible. ~ Bertrand Meyer

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made ~ Robert C. Martin

If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. ~ Edward Yourdon

I became
a sponge. A new chapter began in my own education, and I dual
majored in corporate politics and software development in the real
world. ~ Erik Dietrich

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. ~ H.L. Mencken

Building on our successful partnership, we can now bring together the best of Microsoft's software engineering with the best of Nokia's product engineering, award-winning design, and global sales, marketing and manufacturing, ~ Stephen Elop

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. ~ Alan Kay

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints all
over L.A. -- doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it -- and all Y.T. ever
talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The
regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for all the work she
does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working
on.
It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the government is.
It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which
means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing
or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government's coding
sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever
existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day
out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering
techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been
up to something. ~ Neal Stephenson

In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together. ~ Steve McConnell

A dynamic duo who work well together can be worth any three people working in isolation. ~ Larry Constantine

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer. ~ Jamie Zawinski

Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it. ~ Richard P. Gabriel

Tests are sometimes mistaken with quality assurance. These two notions are not identical: 1) quality assurance ensures that the organization's processes are implemented and applied correctly; 2) testing identifies defects and failures, and provides information on the software and the risks associated with their release to the market ~ Bernard Homes

We must not blame programmers for their bugs. They belong to them only until the code is merged to the repository. After that, all bugs are ours! ~ Yegor Bugayenko

The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,
fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming. ~ Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Technical staff were fairly good at estimation but were poor at defending their estimates ~ Philip Metzger

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed. ~ Martin Fowler

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way. ~ Brian Kernighan

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code ~ Martin Fowler

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality. ~ Niklaus Wirth

You must excuse my gruff conduct," the watchdog said, after they'd been driving for some time, "but you see it's traditional for watchdogs to be ferocious. ~ Norton Juster

Software projects fail for one of two general reasons: the project team lacks the knowledge to conduct a software project successfully, or the project team lacks the resolve to conduct a project effectively. ~ Steve McConnell

Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams. ~ Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

One principle problem of educating software engineers is that they will not use a new method until they believe it works and, more importantly, that they will not believe the method will work until they see it for themselves. ~ Watts Humphrey

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That's what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games - nothing like saving the world. ~ Elon Musk

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. ~ Larry Niven

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward. ~ Jez Humble

The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines. ~ Tom DeMarco

... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names - otherwise you would be selling nothing - like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering". ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Truth can only be found in one place: the code. ~ Robert C. Martin

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise. ~ Larry Wall

Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that's worth making is software that does something new. ~ Scott Rosenberg

Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program. ~ Steve McConnell

We try to solve the problem by rushing through the design process so that enough time is left at the end of the project to uncover the errors that were made because we rushed through the design process ~ Glenford Myers

Life would be much easier if I had the source code. ~ Anonymous

How Ironic, when you do business you create exceptions to create new opportunities, when you write code (do a job) you handle exception to make it clean. ~ Pushkar Saraf

Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. ~ Louis Srygley

Programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time. ~ Steve McConnell

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop. ~ Alan Perlis

More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve. ~ Bill Gates

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. ~ Richard Stallman

The books said that the problem with autism was in the brain, and that made me feel like a faulty computer, something that should be sent back or scrapped. All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I. ~ Elizabeth Moon

Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.' ~ Richard Stallman

Years later, when I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment. ~ Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Recession doesn't deserve the right to exist. There are just too many things to be done in science and engineering to be bogged down by temporary economic dislocations. ~ Walt Disney Company

Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses - it's progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. ~ Bill Gates

Economic engineering is about the design and analysis of frameworks for achieving specific economic objectives. ~ Ben Bernanke

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure. ~ Henry Petroski

Liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social engineering to manipulate human relationships and attitudes. ~ Richard Ebeling

When you yet to do 100% of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and it's pretty rare that you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually need. If you try instead to do 80 percent of what they need, there's a pretty good chance you'll hit a sweet spot. ~ David Heinemeier Hansson

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software. ~ Yukihiro Matsumoto

There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of. ~ Bill Gates

We offer them mediocrity while calling it magic. We offer them the illusion of intelligent software, seducing them into surrendering the task of thinking to the machine. Of course, the machine isn't thinking, which means that nobody is. ~ Larry Constantine

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos's founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books - those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock - also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world's general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company's scaling strategy. ~ Peter Thiel

Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff. ~ Roger McGuinn

Automobiles have always been part of my life, and I'm sure they always will be. What is it about them that moves me? The sound of a great engine, the unity and uniqueness of an automobile's engineering and coachwork, the history of the company and the car, and, of course, the sheer beauty of the thing. ~ Edward Herrmann

The hugely popular Windows 95 operating system revolutionized the software world thanks to its capability of accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of making Bill Gates even richer than he already was. ~ Dave Barry

Conservatives have a deeper intellect and tend to have occupations of the brain in fields like engineering, science, and economics. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to flock to occupations of the heart. ~ Dick Armey

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one - my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art - the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry - and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important ~ Erich Fromm

I have realized that businesses - whether they make dog food or software - don't sell products; they sell solutions. ~ Jay Samit

Many people think all I do is some random engineering work in between caving expeditions. It's been far more deliberate than that. ~ William Stone

Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don't understand the physics of software and it's rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people. Specifically, it's about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems. ~ Pieter Hintjens

Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight. ~ Janine Benyus

Billions of people are living on the earth today with the knowledge of mathematics, physics, and biology. They have the knowledge of stocks market, the knowledge of politics, engineering, law, and medicine. They know about fashion, sports, arts, music and a lot more other aspects of life. However, the sad reality is that a greater percentage of these people do not know who they are nor why they exist. They do not know for what purpose they are on the earth and where they are heading ~ Clement Ogedegbe

Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process. ~ Michael Fox

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code. ~ Ryan Boudinot

We have Dragon [dictation software]," one primary care doctor said, "which you have to be careful of, because I just [dictated] 'Patient's prostate is bothering him' and it turned out 'Patient's prostitute is bothering him. ~ Robert Wachter

I'm quite into the idea of engineering being beautiful. ~ Sean Booth

The brain is the hardware, and the mind is the software, with the totality always in action, hardware plus software. ~ Pearl Zhu

The job of the average manager requires a shift in focus every few minutes. The job of the average software developer requires that the developer not shift focus more often than every few hours. ~ Steve McConnell

Something emerged from the air and slumped on the concrete floor behind Mosquera. The men near the table recoiled in horror. One gasped and stepped backwards, falling over a chair with a crash. Two others crossed themselves. Lock moved the fly so he could see past Mosquera. His blood ran cold. The lumpy mass on the floor looked as though the Devil himself had grabbed Miguel, squashed and scrambled his skin, muscles and bones, and dropped the mess back on the concrete. Like everybody else in the room, Lock was in shock. People didn't die in teleportation, but the evidence was in front of him. What on earth had Mosquera used? ~ J.M. Johnson

Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time. ~ Bill Gates