Software Engineering Quotes

“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

“Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”
― Brian W. Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

“Software testing is a sport like hunting, it's bughunting.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures.”
― Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts

“If it is not written down, it does not exist.”
― Philippe Kruchten

“The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.”
― Richard P. Gabriel

“Life doesn't have a ctrl-z. Type wisely.”
― Imtiaz Iqbal

“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding”
― Burt Rutan

“Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.”
― Louis Srygley

“Life would be much easier if I had the source code.”
― Anonymous

“Technical staff were fairly good at estimation but were poor at defending their estimates”
― Philip Metzger

“How Ironic, when you do business you create exceptions to create new opportunities, when you write code (do a job) you handle exception to make it clean.”
― Pushkar Saraf

“To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible.”
― Bertrand Meyer, Agile!: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly

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

“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