Best Software Engineering Quotes

#1. To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible.

Bertrand Meyer

#2. I use minimal software to make my music - a wav editor and a calculator for my beats to make sure everything falls on mathematical precision. If you were just mapping this out visually, it works by math. I guess it's slightly engineering influenced.

Girl Talk

#3. Software architecture is the set of design decisions which, if made incorrectly, may cause your project to be cancelled.

Eoin Woods

#4. Software engineering is not about right and wrong but only better and worse

Ellen Ullman

#5. The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

Gordon Bell

#6. Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code

Martin Fowler

#7. Building on our successful partnership, we can now bring together the best of Microsoft's software engineering with the best of Nokia's product engineering, award-winning design, and global sales, marketing and manufacturing,

Stephen Elop

#8. Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity.

Jakob Nielsen

#9. The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,
fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

#10. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

#11. The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made

Robert C. Martin

#12. There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

John Baldacci

#13. Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures.

Douglas Crockford

#14. If it is not written down, it does not exist.

Philippe Kruchten

#15. Don't comment bad code - rewrite it.

Brian W. Kernighan

#16. The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

Bill Gates

#17. [Software engineering is the] establishment and use of sound engineering principles to obtain economically software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently.

Friedrich L. Bauer

#18. 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.

Niklaus Wirth

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

Jamie Zawinski

#20. Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Bill Gates

#21. Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

Robert C. Martin

#22. The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.

Tom DeMarco

#23. Software engineering has this in common with having children: the labor before the birth is painful and difficult, but the labor after the birth is where you actually spend most of your effort. Yet

Betsy Beyer

#24. The most dangerous belief for any software company today is that the solution to their adoption problem lies in better software engineering.

Stephen O'Grady

#25. Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.

William J. Clinton

#26. To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That's what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games - nothing like saving the world.

Elon Musk

#27. Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.

Richard P. Gabriel

#28. Code reuse is the Holy Grail of Software Engineering.

Douglas Crockford

#29. The science and engineering of programming just isn't good enough to produce flawless software, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. The

Bruce Schneier

#30. By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

#31. Truth can only be found in one place: the code.

Robert C. Martin

#32. The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

Steve Jobs