Quotes About Software

It may seem like writing tests slows down development; in fact, testing does not cost, it pays, both during development and over the system's lifecycle.

leaders in many companies believe that developers should not talk to customers because this is a waste of valuable developer time.

A Standish Group study found that 45 percent of features in a typical system are never used and 19 percent are rarely used.

true productivity has to be measured relative to the outcomes of the overall system, not just the software. Just producing a lot of lines of code or function points is irrelevant; the real question is, How much improvement in customer outcomes has the development team generated?

Software rarely comes with a warranty.

Software rarely comes with a warranty. Let's

premature design commitment is a design failure mode

We determine scope at the beginning of system development, put a box around it, and figure out how long that scope will take to develop. This is the wrong approach.

development at leading-edge software organizations, like JavaSoft, Microsoft, and Netscape. He called to chat with a

incorporating, Mosaic Communications Corporation opened its doors in Mountain View, California. Four years later, Mosaic Communications had morphed into the half-billion-dollar Netscape Communications Corporation, the fastest-growing software company of all time. This chapter explores how

Taylor believed that the unique success of the 914 copier had inculcated Xerox management with the doctrine that good things derived only from hardware. He was determined to show them that this idea was obsolete. As PARC envisioned the office of the future, a single piece of equipment could be made to serve multiple uses simply by changes in its software.

If you buy a 486 with a SuperVGA, you'll get performance that knocks your socks off, especially if you run Windows.

A 'passing' test doesn't mean 'no problem.' It means no problem *observed*. This time. With these inputs. So far. On my machine.

To me, legacy code is simply code without tests.

Remember, code is your house, and you have to live in it.

As the amount of code in a project grows, it gradually surpasses understanding. The amount of time it takes to figure out what to change just keeps increasing.

The most subtle bugs that we can inject are bugs related to inheritance.

Effective software change, like effective surgery, really involves deeper skills. Working with care doesn't do much for you if you don't use the right tools and techniques. Cover

Code without tests is bad code. It doesn't matter how well written it is; it doesn't matter how pretty or object-oriented or well-encapsulated it is. With tests, we can change the behavior of our code quickly and verifiably. Without them, we really don't know if our code is getting better or worse.

most software- or systems-development projects start out without a context diagram, blissfully unaware that they need one.

To build a software that your users understand, capture the language of that users in a class diagram.

Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn't address the converse—things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.

Release is the beginning of the software's true life; everything before that release is gestation. Either systems grow over time, adapting to their changing environment, or they decay until their costs outweigh their benefits and then die.

Most software is designed for the development lab or the testers in the Quality Assurance (QA) department.