Quotes from Gerald M. Weinberg

When people who are driven by a vision see something wrong, they might say to their teammates, "I feel bad because we're not building the kind of system we can be proud of. What shall we do so we don't feel this way?" On

Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered.

Often when managers say, "Testing takes too long," what they should be saying is, "Fixing the bugs in the product takes too long"—a different cost category. Make sure you're accounting for effort and time under the correct cost category.

There's never an easy answer to the question "Should we do more testing?" because information can guide risk reduction, but doesn't necessarily do so.

When is the 'look out the windshield phase' of driving? Pretty much all driving is looking out the windshield! It's not a phase. Saying 'testing takes too long' is a bit like saying 'safe driving takes too long.

In this business, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place. The

Testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence."- Edsger W. Dijkstra, Computing Pioneer (1930–2002), "Programming as a discipline of mathematical nature," Am. Math. Monthly, 81 (1974), No. 6, pp. 608–12.

If your whole team consists of novice programmers, your expertise will give you considerable power; but if the other team members are also experts, they will attach less importance to your technical expertise. In that case, they'll pay more attention to organizational power, like the power to acquire extra hardware, to extend the schedule, or to capture a more interesting assignment.

Denise: "So your present project is ready to pass to the testing people?" Ralph: "Absolutely." Denise: "Okay, since you're so sure it's adequately tested, I'm going to make you the following generous offer: If fewer than three bugs turn up in your component during testing, I will give you a raise. But if three or more bugs turn up during testing, you won't earn a raise this year." Ralph: "Um . . ." Denise: "Um what?" "Could I just have the component back for a few little tests I want to do?

By making the time tradeoff explicit and by indicating a willingness to contribute time now, I make it clear that it is a problem of limited time, not a problem of limited respect for the other person.

Effective leaders often have to act even when they don't understand all possible factors

If you are a good leader, Who talks little, They will say, When your work is done, And your aim fulfilled, "We did it ourselves." - Lao Tse

Testing gathers information about a product; it does not fix things it finds that are wrong. Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered. Often when managers say, "Testing takes too long," what they should be saying is, "Fixing the bugs in the product takes too long"—a different cost category.

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius. In

Jane easily shifts among activities—testing for discovery, pinpointing, locating, determining significance, repairing, troubleshooting, and testing to learn. As long as she continues to serve her customers, it doesn't really matter which task she performs at any given time.

In the popular image, a problem-solving leader is a solitary genius, but the true leader prefers to produce a success.

Books are no substitute for experience working with people, so now that you've read this book on leadership, go out and interact with people before you read any more.

Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.

Rather than fight change, a more sensible approach is to learn to live with it. Or to make a living from it.

Since nobody's perfect, we need resistance to test our ideas.

Victor Hugo once said that nothing in this world was so powerful as an idea whose time has come. In our time, the idea is technology, especially information processing technology. The programmer partakes of this technology power

When you're not terribly smart, it helps to be a good listener.

Blaming someone else will only put the solution further out of reach.

the more adapted an organism was to present conditions, the less adaptable it tended to be to unknown future conditions.