Quotes About Software Engineering

#1. 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

#2. [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

#3. Software Engineering is that part of Computer Science which is too difficult for the Computer Scientist.

Friedrich L. Bauer

#4. Data scientist (noun): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. - Josh Wills

Rachel Schutt

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

Ellen Ullman

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

Jamie Zawinski

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

Douglas Crockford

#13. 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

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

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

#15. 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.

#16. 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

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

Gordon Bell

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

Eoin Woods

#19. 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

#20. We have a company, Geometric Software, which is into engineering services software. We have a company called Nature's Basket, which is into gourmet retailing. Both are specialized companies.

Adi Godrej

#21. A good estimate is an estimate that provides a clear enough view of the project reality to allow the project leadership to make good decisions about how to control the project to hit its targets.

Steve McConnell

#22. Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.

Bill Gates

#23. Software development is neither a scientific nor an engineering task. It is an act of reality construction that is political and artistic.

David West

#24. You must excuse my gruff conduct," the watchdog said, after they'd been driving for some time, "but you see it's traditional for watchdogs to be ferocious.

Norton Juster

#25. If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.

Jez Humble

#26. Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

Anonymous

#27. Software will get to be somewhat more mature, ah, but it will never be as predictable as most areas of engineering.

Bill Gates

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

Robert C. Martin

#29. 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

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

Douglas Crockford

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

Philippe Kruchten

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

Brian W. Kernighan

#33. 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

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

Bertrand Meyer

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

Bill Gates

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Richard P. Gabriel

#40. 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

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

Robert C. Martin

#42. 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