Wietse Venema Quotes

All software sucks.

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

Testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

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

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

If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

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

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.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

All real programs contain errors until proved otherwise which is impossible.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

When someone builds a bridge, he uses engineers who have been certified as knowing what they are doing. Yet when someone builds you a software program, he has no similar certification, even though your safety may be just as dependent upon that software working as it is upon the bridge supporting your weight.

I found out that most programmers don't like to test their software as intensely as I do.

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.