Dave Parnas Quotes

All software sucks.

And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.

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

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

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.

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

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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

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.

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.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

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

I started working on OpenBSD, and many earlier projects, because I have always felt that vendor systems were not designed for quality.

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.

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.

Apple's advantage is that it designs and builds software together, so if the software isn't excellent, it does the superlative hardware a disservice.

I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.

For us, the real goal is to make it so that the software ecosystem is as healthy as possible.