Wietse Venema Quotes

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.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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

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.

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

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

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

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

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

In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.

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.

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.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

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.

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.

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