Quotes About Quality

We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and "deindividuation" but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code

As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.

That's my ideal day, time with my boys.

The constraint has shifted out of software development. Here's a sad but repeated story: a development team begins applying XP, dramatically improves quality and productivity, but then is disbanded, its leaders fired and the rest of the team scattered.

Actually this book is built on a rather fragile premise: that good code matters. I have seen too much ugly code make too much money to believe that quality of code is either necessary or sufficient for commercial success or widespread use.

Even if there was no long-term economic impact from careful coding I would still choose to write the best code I could.

Sometimes I feel silly introducing methods "just" to satisfy an "aesthetic" urge like symmetry. Aesthetics go deeper than that. Aesthetics engage more of your brain than strictly linear logical thought. Once you have cultivated your sense of the aesthetics of code, the aesthetic impressions you receive of your code is valuable feedback about the quality of the code.

Write contracts for software development that fix time, costs, and quality but call for an ongoing negotiation of the precise scope of the system. Reduce risk by signing a sequence of short contracts instead of one long one.

XP always keeps the system in deployable condition. Problems are not allowed to accumulate.

Write tests until fear is transformed into boredom

If you're happy slamming some code together that more or less works and you're happy never looking at the result again, TDD is not for you. TDD rests on a charmingly naïve geekoid assumption that if you write better code, you'll be more successful. TDD helps you to pay attention to the right issues at the right time so you can make your designs cleaner, you can refine your designs as you learn.

Beta testing is a symptom of weak testing practices and poor communication with customers.

If there are forms of testing, like stress and load testing, that find defects after development is "complete," bring them into the development cycle. Run load and stress tests continuously and automatically.

However, most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time.

Used Pluggable Adaptor, which we promise not to use again for four months, minimum, because it makes code hard to statically analyze.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.

To those men and women in business, remember the ultimate end of your work: to make a better product, to create better lives. I ask you to plan for the longer term and avoid that temptation of quick and easy paper profits.

After thirty years working as a commercial fiction translator, I've reached to the conclussion that, on average, the more pages a book has, the less literature there is in it.

That's ruining two good drinks (adding water to scotch).

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous.

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...