Fred Brooks Quotes

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.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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

I used Agitator on some code I had unit-tested, and it made me a better tester. As an Agitar Fellow, I look forward to the leverage of working with an outstanding organization as together we continue to improve the value of developer testing.

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

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

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!

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.

All software sucks.

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

In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.

Accidental stacks considered harmful.

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.

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

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

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.

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.

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

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.

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

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.

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

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.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.