Steve McConnell Quotes

I'm agile.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

In software, consultants sometimes tell you to buy into certain software-development methods to the exclusion of other methods. That’s unfortunate because if you buy into any single methodology 100 percent, you’ll see the whole world in terms of that methodology. In some instances, you’ll miss opportunities to use other methods better suited to your current problem.

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.

We've been spending this kind of ramp up time from the time we started the company to now with a lot of different projects in development. What we aren't doing is saying, "We have to do this, this and this." Because the "this, this and this" might not be ready and you don't want to go and make something that's not ready.

I am a programmer.

But typically for a project like the Mac, the size we had was pretty good. And it has different stages. The team grows as you have to write manuals and do testing... though the Mac had no formal testing.

If we're trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can't write every line of code. I can't write any lines of code.

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

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.

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

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

When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You'd see all the different ways they'd work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You'd see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you'd go see Aetna Life Insurance.

You can’t really understand the challenges involved with any major tech project until you start trying to build it.

I was a programmer.

People sometimes ask me what I did when I was hired at HAL. The answer is that I was a programmer. And an engineer. And a designer. And I marketed our games. I also ordered food. And I helped clean up. And, it was all great fun.

A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

I have other projects to do. I try not to let that documentation interfere with my present day.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

If too many things have to happen in order to bring about the situation you want, then back out of it and try again later.

Developers, developers, developers...

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.