Quotes About Development

Most people assume that maintenance begins when an application is released, that maintenance means fixing bugs and enhancing features. We think these people are wrong.

The best way to start fixing a bug is to make it reproducible. After all, if you can't reproduce it, how will you know if it is ever fixed?

Requirements are not architecture. Requirements are not design, nor are they the user interface. Requirements are need.

Over the years, you'll be amazed at how your experience has blossomed and your skills have grown.

Tracer bullets show what you're hitting. This may not always be the target. You then adjust your aim until they're on target. That's the point. It's the same with tracer code.

Learning is a continuous and ongoing process.

Always take small, deliberate steps, checking for feedback and adjusting before proceeding

All software becomes legacy as soon as it's written.

While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard.

we just don't have the time to go chasing after bugs that the automated tests could have found for us. We have to spend our time writing new code—and new bugs.

Pragmatic Programmers, however, tend to prefer using tracer bullets.

Once they've agreed to the layout, you might throw it away and recode

Striving to better, oft we mar what's well. • King Lear 1.4

The scope and quality of the system you produce should be specified as part of that system's requirements.

expiring assets.[3] Your knowledge becomes out of date as new techniques, languages, and environments are developed.

Well, software doesn't quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening—it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost.

Like the craftsman, expect to add to your toolbox regularly. Always be on the lookout for better ways of doing things.

We write code, which communicates our intentions to a machine and documents our thinking for future generations of developers.

Just as woodworkers sometimes build jigs to guide the construction of complex pieces, programmers can write code that itself writes code.

There are certain tips and tricks that apply at all levels of software development, ideas that are almost axiomatic, and processes that are virtually universal. However, these approaches are rarely documented as such; you'll mostly find them written down as odd sentences in discussions of design, project management, or coding.

Software defects manifest themselves in a variety of ways, from misunderstood requirements to coding errors.

One's skill is never complete, one's knowledge is forever lacking, one's taste is invariably altered, one's opinion ever subject to controversy. There is a complete and constant urge towards improvement.

As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become and artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve.

know the law of human nature: acts produce habits, habits breed dispositions, dispositions form the will, and the rightly-formed will is character.