Gerald M. Weinberg Quotes

Survival requires that we learn to laugh things off and start over

Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.

Specifications evolve together with programs and programmers. Writing a program is a process of learning — both for the programmer and the person who commissions the program.

why is it so hard for developers to submit their work for review by others or to try to improve their own skills by reviewing the work of others? Curiously, superior developers tend to find value with walkthrough and inspection processes while the merely clever do not. So, as always, the good get better and the bad get worse.

What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.

lack drama. Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode? Organizing

Testing gathers information about a product; it does not fix things it finds that are wrong.

Programmers do not ordinarily work in isolation. Although an individual programmer may find herself assigned the task of writing a program, even then she has other programmers to whom she may turn for help — and who, at the same time, may be turning to her.

The name of a thing is not the thing.

In the seed model, Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.

More often, then, we will be doing evaluation of programs not with respect to one another but with respect to a situation — a total situation — in which they are developed. Looking honestly at the situation, we are never looking for the best program, seldom looking for a good one, but always looking for one that meets the requirements.

If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it.

Systems are complex. A computer system is not just hardware, not just software, not even just people plus hardware plus software. The procedures, formal and informal, that have evolved with the system are part of the system; so is the current load on various components, and so is the attitude and experience of the users. Even among the commonly accepted “parts” of a system, clear lines of separation do not exist. Hardware merges with operating system, operating system merges with programming language, programming language merges with debugging tools, debugging tools merge with documentation, and documentation merges with training, and all of them mingle with the social climate in which the system is used.

One of the hardest choices for technical stars who become leaders is losing touch with the latest in technology.

When people who are driven by a vision see something wrong, they might say to their teammates, “I feel bad because we’re not building the kind of system we can be proud of. What shall we do so we don’t feel this way?” On