Software Development Quotes

“The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.”
― Vitruvius

“Programming is breaking of one big impossible task into several very small possible tasks.”
― Jazzwant

“Software testing is a sport like hunting, it's bughunting.”
― Amit Kalantri

“If it is not written down, it does not exist.”
― Philippe Kruchten

“Programming is a social activity.”
― Robert C. Martin

“Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“When you yet to do 100% of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and it's pretty rare that you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually need. If you try instead to do 80 percent of what they need, there's a pretty good chance you'll hit a sweet spot.”
― David Heinemeier Hansson

“It’s better to have a hole in your team than an asshole in your team!”
― Samir Desai

“Years later, when I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Software Development is an ideal gas: it occupies all the volume it can.”
― Pat Boens

“To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible.”
― Bertrand Meyer, Agile!: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly

“Software development is the process of creating a computer software.
It includes preparing a design, coding the program, and fixing the
bugs. The final goal of software development is to translate user
needs to software product, while continuously improving the team
and the process.”
― Paulo Caroli

“...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.”
― Robert Nystrom

“It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Software always remain softly for End users! But sometimes hardly to developers!”
― Bananeza Pacifique

“Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements.”
― Pearl Zhu, 12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO's Situational Leadership Practices

“Software architecture is the set of design decisions which, if made incorrectly, may cause your project to be cancelled.”
― Eoin Woods

“A good estimate is an estimate that provides a clear enough view of the project reality to allow the project leadership to make good decisions about how to control the project to hit its targets.”
― Steve McConnell

“Worse yet is the rejection of upfront requirements. The basic observation is correct: requirements will change, and are hard anyway to capture at the beginning. In no way, however, does it imply the dramatic conclusion that upfront requirements are useless! What it does imply is that requirements should be subject to change, like all other artifacts on the software process.

[...]

The agile advice here is irresponsible and serious software projects should ignore it.The sound practice is to start collecting requirements at the beginning, produce a provisional version prior to engaging in design, and treat the requirements as a living product that undergoes constant adaptation throughout the project.”
― Bertrand Meyer

“The Scrum idea of a separated Scrum Master is good for Scrum, but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers.”
― Bertrand Meyer

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― Mplussoft

“El desarrollo de software comparte con el deporte profesional la característica de lograr que los treintañeros se sientan decrépitos”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“In this chapter we've seen that, unlike when building a house, when it comes to software it's almost impossible to know what you want. And even if you did know, it would be impossible to know how long each part would take to do. And even if you did know the theoretical length of each task, it would be impossible to work out the amount of time it would take an actual team of a specified size to do it. Which goes some way to explaning the sordid catalogue of failure that is the history of software projects over the last fifty years.”
― Patrick Gleeson, Working with Coders: A Guide to Software Development for the Perplexed Non-Techie

“The quickest methods aren't always the fastest methods”
― Gordon Beeming

“There were in fact bugs," he recalls, "But the essential difference was in the obviousness of bugs, the repeatability of bugs, and potential for fixing bugs oneself. In this environment, bugs were only temporary delays on a steady road towards excellence and stability.”
― Glyn Moody