Quotes & Sayings About Software Development

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings. — Niklaus Wirth

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

High-quality software is not expensive. High-quality software is faster and cheaper to build and maintain than low-quality software, from initial development all the way through total cost of ownership. — Capers Jones

In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer. — Pierre Omidyar

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

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build. — Bjarne Stroustrup

If it is not written down, it does not exist. — Philippe Kruchten

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

Countering the juggernaut of formalism is a minority worldview of equal historical standing, even though it does not share equal awareness or popularity. Variously known as hermeneutics, constructivism, interpretationalism, and most recently postmodernism, this tradition has consistently challenged almost everything advanced by the formalists. Iterative development practices, including XP, and object thinking are consistent with the hermeneutic worldview. Unfortunately, most object, XP, and agile practitioners are unaware of this tradition and its potential for providing philosophical support and justification for their approach to software development. — David West

The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming from parts of the software development process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we've seen, though, the need to program is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required-that is, piecemeal growth. — Richard P. Gabriel

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

If the DHS insists, as bureaucracies are apt to do, that open-source must be certified via a sanctioned, formal process, it will interfere with the informal process of open-source itself. It seems to me the DHS is trying to turn an open-source development project into a Microsoft (or IBM or Oracle) software development project. And we know what that means: more, not fewer, errors
security and otherwise. — Mark Hall

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software-development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. — Steve McConnell

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

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer — Bjarne Stroustrup

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

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages. — Niklaus Wirth

It's harder than you might think to squander millions of dollars, but a flawed software development process is a tool well suited to the job. — Alan Cooper

The term developed out of a recognition that you have to integrate development and operations tasks to develop software efficiently. The kind of workflow you want to enable is one in which you can develop an app, deploy it, learn from production usage of it, change it in response to what you learn, and repeat the cycle quickly and reliably. — Scott Guthrie

Trying to apply formal methods to all software projects is just as bad as trying to apply code-and-fix development to all projects. — Steve McConnell

...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

Software development requires very little capital investment, since it is basically intellectual capital, pure thoughtstuff, expressed in a set of detailed instructions written in a language that machines can understand. — Brent Schlender

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

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent. — Dan Kaminsky

A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse — Anonymous

You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on. — Mike Krieger

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

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

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day. — Jim Highsmith

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

We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects. — Alistair Cockburn

Software development requires the cooperation of everyone on the team. Programmers are often called "developers," but in reality everyone on the team is part of the development effort. When you share the work, customers identify the next requirements while programmers work on the current ones. Testers help the team figure out how to stop introducing bugs. Programmers spread the cost of technical infrastructure over the entire life of the project. Above all, everyone helps keep everything clean. — Anonymous

Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management. It requires that some process is already in place so that Kanban can be applied to incrementally change the underlying process. — David J. Anderson

In my experience, requirements change quite often, or new situations will arise that weren't anticipated at the start of the project. If the situation can be addressed with a plugin, I just whip open the standalone plugin page, make the updates and pop the new plugin back in. Because the plugin is self-contained, it's easy to recreate the problem, fix it, and get it back into the codebase. — Robert Duchnik

After graduation, I took a job with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in software development. I don't think I was there more than a month. — John Katzman

The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity. — Grady Booch

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.

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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

Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time. — Brad Stone

Software development was insecurities all the way down. Even — Ken MacLeod

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

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization. — David J. Anderson

People are looking for software development that actually does something useful ... People are looking for partners who deliver when promised, and at a reasonable and transparent price. I believe that the days of being able to value price software are numbered. — Kent Beck

To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible. — Bertrand Meyer

Corporations have been killing the risk-taking and exploration that makes software great. They have tried to rip the soul out of development. — Brian Behlendorf

A good standalone plugin can also make you a fair amount of money. Many developers make a decent living by simply maintaining and updating one or two crucial plugins that are far better than anything available for free. — Robert Duchnik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is really no bad software development process. There is only how you are doing it today and better. — Gary Gruver

As an Agile software development team, we'd been following the hallowed eXtreme Programming tenets, including YAGNI. That is, You Aren't Gonna Need It: a caution to not write unnecessary code - — Anonymous

Can a one judge sitting somewhere in a trial court issue an order that says nobody in the world is allowed to have, to use, to improve or to develop software for playing multimedia content without the permission of the manufacturers of the content themselves? .. This is an astonishing development in the course of our understanding of what we call the copyright bargain, the relationship between authors' rights, publishers' leverages and consumers' needs. — Eben Moglen

In software, consultants sometimes tell you to buy into certain software-development methods to the exclusion of other methods. That's unfortunate because if you buy into any single methodology 100 percent, you'll see the whole world in terms of that methodology. In some instances, you'll miss opportunities to use other methods better suited to your current problem. — Steve McConnell

By far the most common project risks in software development are poor requirements and poor project planning, thus preparation tends to focus on improving requirements and project plans. — Steve McConnell

Programming is a social activity. — Robert C. Martin

Software development is neither a scientific nor an engineering task. It is an act of reality construction that is political and artistic. — David West

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

Ultimately, I try to think of my application's main codebase as just stringing together various components and code from many sources. It just controls logic and flow. The real nitty-gritty is handled behind the scenes. This is why frameworks like Backbone are so important - they hide a lot of the details in the background and allow you to just focus on the flow and control of your application. — Robert Duchnik

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem.
This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He's also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective. — Peter Sims

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better. — Steve McConnell

countries allow organizations to claim some aspects of software development as R&D and thereby receive tax benefits for doing so. — Scott W. Ambler

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge. — Jim Highsmith

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.

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

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

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

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