Dave Parnas Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.

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.

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.

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

Defect-free software does not exist.

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.

First, I'd like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard.

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

I have never written a line of commercial code in my life. Nor should I.

The most sought-after candidates in the world today by companies like mine are people who make computer software - there's a shortage of talent.

I know one business, and that's how to make software.

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!

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

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

All software sucks.

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

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

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.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.