Best Software Development Quotes & Sayings

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. — Kent Beck

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

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline. — William J. Clinton

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them. — Joel Spolsky

There are a variety of techniques for breaking software down into pieces and making software development more efficient. Many of these techniques have been sort of ... and everybody got excited about but very little benefit was actually derived once the thing was put into practice. — Bill Gates

Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard lower the barriers to accountability in software development and increase the value of developer testing. — Kent Beck

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. — Richard Stallman

Software development is a cruel business. Every detail matters - just — Erik Peterson

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit. — Neal Stephenson

Can't we do better with Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software? — Miles Anthony Smith

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

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. — Rob Pike

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. Particularly on large projects, each of the following mismanagement actions has often been responsible for doubling software development costs. — Barry Boehm

jQuery is by far the most widely used library for JavaScript. It is used on more than 50% of websites. Many frameworks, such as Backbone and Twitter's Bootstrap, are built on top of jQuery. Being able to extend and write plugins for jQuery can not only save lots of time, but also makes code much cleaner and easier to maintain. — Robert Duchnik

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works. — Linus Torvalds

Testing was never going to be fashionable, but you could hardly run a respectable software development shop with no testing effort at all. — Stephen Baxter

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features. — Douglas Crockford

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.

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

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations. — Kent Beck

Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity. — Jakob Nielsen

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management - testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes. — Tilo Linz

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy. — Craig Venter

Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time. — Robert Duchnik

When people write software, they are not writing it for themselves. In fact, they are not even writing primarily for the computer. Rather, good programmers know that code is written for the next human being who has to read it in order to maintain or reuse it. If that person cannot understand the code, it's all but useless in a realistic development scenario. — Mark Lutz

Software development governance versus software project governance. Interest in project governance predates research in software development governance. There is substantial overlap between software project governance and software development governance as much software development in software organizations is done via software projects. — Anonymous

There's a huge latent market for software development that's just flat-out honest. — Kent Beck

I know about the tech industry in that I follow what apps are hot and software development. I know my way around different browsers. I know how to restart a computer. — T. J. Miller

We have four blocks here. Block A, where we are now, is administration and recreation. Block B is software development. Block C is research and storage. Block D is where the main Stormbreaker assembly line is found." "Where's breakfast?" Alex asked. — Anthony Horowitz

I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity. — David Wroblewski

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.

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates