Will Wright Quotes

Defect-free software does not exist.

Testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

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

Running the test suite like this allows us to catch problems when they are just introduced.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

All software sucks.

All real programs contain errors until proved otherwise which is impossible.

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.

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

An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.

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

Developer testing is an important step towards accountability. It gives developers a way to demonstrate the quality of the software they produce.

A very important part of game development is testing - something that a lot of developers don't do.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

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

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

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

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

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.