Steve McConnell Quotes

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.

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

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

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

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

I used Agitator on some code I had unit-tested, and it made me a better tester. As an Agitar Fellow, I look forward to the leverage of working with an outstanding organization as together we continue to improve the value of developer testing.

Developer testing is an important step towards accountability. It gives developers a way to demonstrate the quality of the software they produce.

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.

Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.

More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad'' than in languages proclaimed "wonderful'' - much more.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

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

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.

Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . .

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

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.

Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.