Software Quality Quotes

“Quality is not an act. It is a habit.” -Aristotle


“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” -Steve Jobs


“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, Code Complete”


“Testing is not a phase, it’s a way of life.” -Elisabeth Hendrickson


“A true professional does not waste the time and money of other people by handing over software that is not reasonably free of obvious bugs; that has not undergone minimal unit testing; that does not meet the specifications and requirements; that is gold-plated with unnecessary features; or that looks like junk.” -Daniel Read


“Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.” -Bertrand Meyer


“Be clear about the difference between your role as a programmer and as a tester. The tester in you must be suspicious, uncompromising, hostile, and compulsively obsessed with destroying, utterly destroying, the programmer’s software.” -Boris Beizer


“More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known. The thinking that must be done to create a useful test can discover and eliminate bugs before they are coded–indeed, test-design thinking can discover and eliminate bugs at every stage in the creation of software, from conception to specification, to design, coding and the rest.” –Boris Beizer


“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.” -Burt Rutan


“Never allow the same bug to bite you twice.” ―Steve Maguire


“When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand.” ―Paul Graham, “The Other Road Ahead,” 2001


“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” –William A. Foster


“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” –Henry Ford


“Don’t just fix the bugs; fix whatever permitted the bugs in the first place.” –Anonymous


“Software bugs are like cockroaches; there are probably dozens hiding in difficult to reach places for every one you find and fix.” ―Donald G. Firesmith


“If you don’t care about quality, you can meet any other requirement” ―Gerald M. Weinberg


“Pay attention to zeros. If there is a zero, someone will divide by it.” ―Cem Kaner


“If you’re too busy hiding your lack of knowledge, you won’t feel comfortable asking questions. You’ll think you should already know the answers. Let me tell you a secret: no one knows all the answers. No one. Not knowing the answers isn’t a sign of weakness—not asking questions is.” ―Elisabeth Hendrickson


“If you don’t like unit testing your product, most likely your customers won’t like to test it either.” ―Anonymous


“Quality is not something you add like salt at the end, it must be baked in.” ―Unknown


“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.” ―Anonymous


“f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n sftwr tstng.” ―Anonymous


“A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.” ―Doug Linder


“Our job is to tell you your baby is ugly!” ―Software Testers


“3 Errors walk into a bar. The barman says, “normally I’d Throw you all out, but tonight I’ll make an Exception.” ―@iamdevloper


“Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.” ―Kreitzberg and Shneiderman


“I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed” ―Martin Fowler, “UML Distilled”


“There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.” ―Steven Levy


“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging.” ―Fred Brooks”


“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.” ―C.A.R. Hoare


“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
―Fred Brooks


“The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.” ―Edsger Dijkstra


“You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.” ―Jim McCarthy


“Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.” ―Fred Brooks, “The Mythical Man-Month”


“Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place.” ―Gordon Bell

“If you’re an average programmer, you’re a poor programmer. So don’t be average.” ―David Pallmann

 “People forget how fast you did a job – but they remember how well you did it” ―Howard Newton

“Fixing bugs is only important when the value of having the bug fixed exceeds the cost of the fixing it.” ―Joel Spolsky

“Programmer’s Drinking Song (sung to the tune of “100 Bottles of Beer”)
99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again,
101 little bugs in the code.
101 bugs in the code….
(Repeat until BUGS = 0)”
―Anonymous (source)

“The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back..” ―Fred Brooks

“Spend more Quality Time with your code.” ―David Pallmann

“The only person who likes change is a wet baby.” ―Carr, Hard, Trahant: “Change Process”

“A good model guides your thinking, a bad one warps it.” ―Brian Marick

 

 


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