Quotes About Software

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software-development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find.

once gotos are introduced, they spread through the code like termites through a rotting house.

usually more time is spent in making good-looking presentation slides than in improving the quality of the software.

Copy and paste is a design error

You can do anything with stacks and iteration that you can do with recursion.

developers insert an average of 1 to 3 defects per hour into their designs and 5 to 8 defects per hour into code

The goal is to minimize the amount of a program you have to think about at any one time. You might think of this as mental juggling—the more mental balls the program requires you to keep in the air at once, the more likely you'll drop one of the balls, leading to a design or coding error.

Spend your time on the 20 percent of the refactorings that provide 80 percent of the benefit.

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...] Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it's so important that Software's Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity. Complexity is not a new feature of software development.

People who are effective at developing high-quality software have spent years accumulating dozens of techniques, tricks, and magic incantations. The techniques are not rules; they are analytical tools.

Worst of all was the flight software that handled data on board the rover, writing to and reading from the "flash" memory that was our equivalent of a computer's hard drive. The read and write commands too often just didn't work. The command we seemed to use the most was the one the Flight Software team called "SHUTDOWN_DAMMIT", which was like hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL on a personal computer, killing everything off and starting over.

I do as much debugging as possible on the Mac, but I occasionally must debug problems in the PC world, which is significantly slower.

The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.

I love making things, like software, and films, and laughter. And working with Gus Silber, to make the Funny Business book, has been a fantastic journey.

I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows.

Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make all fields final unless they need to be mutable.

Sometimes abstraction and encapsulation are at odds with performance — although not nearly as often as many developers believe — but it is always a good practice first to make your code right, and then make it fast.

Technologically things have changed, new softwares have come up. I am happy keeping myself abreast with time.

During the three-day mapping activity, the team had numerous discussions about the role of software testing, customer involvement and responsibility, striking the right balance of iterations, and how "minimal" a minimally viable product should be.

Separate organizations with related software needs often find themselves duplicating effort, either by redundantly writing similar code in-house, or by purchasing similar products from proprietary vendors. When they realize what's going on, the organizations may pool their resources and create (or join) an open source project tailored to their needs. The advantages are obvious: the costs of development are divided, but the benefits accrue to all.

No matter how good a jockey, he can't turn a plow horse into a thoroughbred. It was the same with chips and software. Indeed, an operating system depended on a reliable chip.

If you don't measure the performance, you're just guessing, and if you're guessing, you're not very likely to write top-notch code.

NT is alarmingly complex. Consisting of six million lines of code, the program is among humanity's most intricate handiworks. "No one mind can comprehend it all," Cutler says. A