Wietse Venema Quotes

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

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

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

We trained for a lot more malfunctions than any ever happen.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

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.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

When you make mistakes during routines, it's not easy getting through them.

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

Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

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

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.

Running the test suite like this allows us to catch problems when they are just introduced.

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.

Finding out exactly what went wrong is key toward preventing future debacles.

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

Software tends not to kill people, and so we accept incredibly fast innovation loops because the consequences are tolerable and the results are astonishing.

I designed and developed an unbelievable number of applications early in my life.

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

If you don't fix latent failures in your system, you're asking for trouble.