Steve McConnell Quotes

One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project.

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

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.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target. The best example of this was the Apollo project in the United States.

You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it is.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.

aim, n. The task we set our wishes to.

I am a person who lives my life based on intention. I don't do anything without intention because intention determines the outcome of your life. It's like cause and effect.

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

You gotta have goals!

Who cares and who doesn't care about a project, is going to shape the project in a significant way.

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

Linux has more than satisfied any small initial expectations I had. It's simply incredible how successful Linux has been, and how good a time I've had developing it and leading the project. It does take a lot of my time, but it's time I really enjoy spending, and Linux has continued to be challenging both technically and from a managing standpoint.

An undefined goal is unreachable.

What matters is where you want to go. Focus in the right direction!

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

You can't hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have

In software you can't really add people and expect to get more done, because their ability to understand the program and what's going on it would require so much investment and all their work would require so much review that you'd be more likely to slow things down.