Martin Fowler Quotes & Sayings

I can only think of so many good ideas in a week. Having other people contribute makes my life easier. — Martin Fowler

A pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others. — Martin Fowler

If someone were to come up to you in a dark alley and say, "Psst, wanna see a UML diagram?" that
diagram would probably be a class diagram. — Martin Fowler

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility. — Martin Fowler

One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can't. — Martin Fowler

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well. — Martin Fowler

Poorly designed code usually takes more code to do the same things, often because the code quite literally does the same thing in several places. — Martin Fowler

The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing. — Martin Fowler

... parts of classic MVC don't really make sense for rich clients these days. — Martin Fowler

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly. — Martin Fowler

So I hope I've made clear that imposing agile methods is a very red flag. — Martin Fowler

One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase. — Martin Fowler

When you actually sit down to write some code, you learn things that you didn't get from thinking about them in modeling terms ... there is a feedback process there that you can only really get at from executing some things and seeing what works — Martin Fowler

If you're a technical lead, you need to be coding. — Martin Fowler

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed — Martin Fowler

Now I'm a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work. — Martin Fowler

Parallel inheritance hierarchies is really a special case of shotgun surgery. In this case, every time you make a subclass of one class, you also have to make a subclass of another. — Martin Fowler

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code — Martin Fowler

I can't choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care. — Martin Fowler

It is impossible not to notice Ruby on Rails. It has had a huge effect both in
and outside the Ruby community ... Rails has become a standard to which even
well-established tools are comparing themselves to. — Martin Fowler

Other than when you are very close to a deadline, however, you should not put off refactoring because you haven't got time. Experience with several projects has shown that a bout of refactoring results in increased productivity. Not having enough time usually is a sign that you need to do some refactoring. — Martin Fowler

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers. — Martin Fowler

I write them to improve my productivity as a programmer. Making the quality assurance department happy is just a side effect. Unit tests are highly localized. Each test class works within a single package. It tests the interfaces to other packages, but beyond that it assumes the rest just works.

Functional tests are a different animal. They are written to ensure the software as a whole works. They provide quality assurance to the customer and don't care about programmer productivity. They should be developed by a different team, one who delights in finding bugs. — Martin Fowler

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler

Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent. — Martin Fowler

If you're afraid to change something it is clearly poorly designed. — Martin Fowler

I've learned to always avoid saying "always". — Martin Fowler

If you can get today's work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can't possibly get tomorrow's work done tomorrow, then you lose. — Martin Fowler

In almost all cases, I'm opposed to setting aside time for refactoring. In my view refactoring is not an activity you set aside time to do. Refactoring is something you do all the time in little bursts. — Martin Fowler

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed. — Martin Fowler

A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead. — Martin Fowler