Quotes About Software

The process is called estimation, not exactimation. —Phillip Armour

The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important. — Fred Brooks

Programmers who program into a language first decide what thoughts they want to express, and then they determine how to express those thoughts using the tools provided by their specific language.

If you can't figure out how to use a class based solely on its interface documentation, the right response is not to pull up the source code and look at the implementation. That's good initiative but bad judgment. The right response is to contact the author of the class and say I can't figure out how to use this class.

By far the most common project risks in software development are poor requirements and poor project planning, thus preparation tends to focus on improving requirements and project plans.

developer testing should probably take 8 to 25 percent of the total project time.

Immature testing organizations tend to have about five clean tests for every dirty test.

Mature testing organizations tend to have five dirty tests for every clean test.

it's done by creating 25 times as many dirty tests

Eighty percent of the errors are found in 20 percent of a project's classes or routines

The picture of the software designer deriving his design in a rational, error-free way from a statement of requirements is quite unrealistic. No system has ever been developed in that way, and probably none ever will. Even the small program developments shown in textbooks and papers are unreal. They have been revised and polished until the author has shown us what he wishes he had done, not what actually did happen. — David Parnas Paul Clements

In software, consultants sometimes tell you to buy into certain software-development methods to the exclusion of other methods. That's unfortunate because if you buy into any single methodology 100 percent, you'll see the whole world in terms of that methodology. In some instances, you'll miss opportunities to use other methods better suited to your current problem.

the error rate in manual testing is comparable to the bug rate in the code being tested.

code reading detected about 80 percent more faults per hour than testing

the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history. Of course software has become even more complex since 1989, and Dijkstra's ratio of 1 to 109could easily be more like 1 to 1015 today.

Dijkstra pointed out that no one's skull is really big enough to contain a modern computer program (Dijkstra 1972), which means that we as software developers shouldn't try to cram whole programs into our skulls at once; we should try to organize our programs in such a way that we can safely focus on one part of it at a time.

Because successful programming depends on minimizing complexity, a skilled programmer will build in as much flexibility as needed to meet the software's requirements but will not add flexibility—and related complexity—beyond what's required.

Some will say that this is merely a matter of software, which is intrinsically more adaptable than hardware like televisions or cellular phones. But before the Web became mainstream in the mid-1990s, the pace of software innovation followed the exact same 10/ 10 pattern of development that we saw in the spread of other twentieth-century technologies.

Conventionally, a developer will create a piece of software, and once it's finished, expose a small part of its functionality to outside developers via the API. The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.

People everywhere love Windows.

I love retouching images on Photoshop.

If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint.

Sell a feeling to your target audience Start with the negative emotions that your target audience feels. What keeps them up at night? Our audience feels frustrated and overwhelmed with manual data entry. I sold peace of mind. We installed, configured, and supported the software. There was no need to hire an expensive firm to build and maintain custom software. Our product performed the function of many apps combined. If there was an issue, we were the point of contact.