Software Engineering Quotes

On this page you will find all the quotes on the topic "Software Engineering". There are currently 117 quotes in our collection about Software Engineering. Discover the TOP 10 sayings about Software Engineering!
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  • … what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.

  • Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

  • Adding last-minute features, whether in response to competitive pressure, as a developer's pet feature, or on the whim of management, causes more bugs in software than almost anything else.

    John Robbins (2000). “Debugging Applications: Microsoft”
  • We try to solve the problem by rushing through the design process so that enough time is left at the end of the project to uncover the errors that were made because we rushed through the design process

    Glenford J. Myers (1978). “Composite/structured design”, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company
  • We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.

  • The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.

    Self   Hands   Smell  
    Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2004). “Programming Perl: 3rd Edition”, p.4, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
  • The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.

    "The Emperor's Old Clothes". Tony Hoare's lecture at the 1980 ACM Turing Award in Nashville, Tennessee; "Communications of the ACM", Volume 24, Issue 2, dl.acm.org. February 1981.
  • Agile methods derive much of their agility by relying on the tacit knowledge embodied in the team, rather than writing the knowleadge down in plans.

    Team   Writing   Agility  
  • Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

  • A brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work.

    Steve McConnell (2004). “Code Complete”, p.107, Pearson Education
  • A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.

    Design   Mind   Fans  
    "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering". Paper by Fred Brooks, 1986.
  • Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

  • There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

    Writing   Errors   Two  
    "Epigrams on Programming". ACM "SIGPLAN" Notices 17 (9), (pp. 7-13), September 1982.
  • A dynamic duo who work well together can be worth any three people working in isolation.

  • I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

    Usenet article "s///e bizarreness", groups.google.com. January 4, 1991.
  • Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

  • Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

    "Excel HSC Softw Design&Devel + Cards SG". Book by Geoff Lancaster, 2001.
  • Software engineering economics.

    Mingshu Li, Barry Boehm, Leon J. Osterweil (2005). “Unifying the Software Process Spectrum: International Software Process Workshop, SPW 2005, Beijing, China, May 25-27, 2005 Revised Selected Papers”, p.66, Springer Science & Business Media
  • It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.

  • The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

  • The job of the average manager requires a shift in focus every few minutes. The job of the average software developer requires that the developer not shift focus more often than every few hours.

    Teamwork   Jobs   Average  
    Steve McConnell (1997). “Software Project Survival Guide”, p.45, Microsoft Press
  • It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

  • The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

  • I have a pretty major problem with a language where one of the most common variables has the name $_

  • If you can't test it, don't build it. If you don't test it, rip it out.

    Rip   Tests   Bugs  
  • Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

    Memorandum to Peter van Emde Boas, 29 Mar. 1977
  • It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trival details of a program - such as where its bugs are.

    Details   Bugs   Language  
  • The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.

    "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. November 28, 2000.
  • If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.

  • 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.

    Witty   Humorous   Simple  
    "The Emperor's Old Clothes". Communications of the ACM 24 (2), (pp. 75-83), February 1981.
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