Quotes About Software

SCCS is the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out.

Inslaw, a District of Columbia computer company whose software tracking system called PROMIS has been used by law enforcement to track cases and criminals. "but it will track anything once its provided with the rules," Inslaw's founder says.

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.

Readers need to understand programs in detail and in concept. Sometimes they move from detail to concept, sometimes from concept to detail.

The majority of the cost of software is incurred after the software has been first deployed. Thinking about my experience of modifying code, I see that I spend much more time reading the existing code than I do writing new code. If I want to make my code cheap, therefore, I should make it easy to read.

A framework with all protected fields would be more immediately usable but harder to evolve later.

The purposes of two constructors with different sets of parameters are not always obvious, but the name of the factory methods can suggest the reason clients might want to create an object each way.

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you're ready to engineer

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.

Listening , Testing , Coding , Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something .

Folk wisdom in software development teaches that interfaces shouldn't be unduly influenced by implementations. Writing a test first is a concrete way to achieve this separation.

Write tests until fear is transformed into boredom

In software development, "perfect" is a verb, not an adjective. There is no perfect process. There is no perfect design. There are no perfect stories. You can, however, perfect your process, your design, and your stories.

Software development is a game of insight, and insight comes to the prepared, rested, relaxed mind.

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.

Without the adjustment, you are working under a lie. Everyone knows it and has to hide to protect themselves. This is no way to get good software done and deployed;

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

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

work on contributing a clever piece of computer code to an Open Source project.

For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business's profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation's wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs.

many software companies now deploy the Scrum project management methodology, which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings (often held standing up to minimize the urge to bloviate).