Gerald M. Weinberg Quotes

The shortsighted or insecure team leader may feel that the best way to please management is to promise them whatever they ask. But, ultimately, what the management wants is kept promises, and these can only be obtained if the team leader can win team acceptance of the promises as their goals. What the team leader must learn is that Managers — no matter how hard they press for promises — really want results. Results will be far more easily obtained if they are obtained in the pursuit of goals set with full team participation.

"Testing gathers information about a product; it does not fix things it finds that are wrong. Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered. Often when managers say, "Testing takes too long," what they should be saying is, "Fixing the bugs in the product takes too long" — a different cost category."

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

Human knowledge is by necessity incomplete. We cannot know in advance what we might be able to know and what might be essentially unknowable. But of one thing we can be sure: if we do not try to find things out, we shall never succeed.

Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.

the job of programming can be fruitfully looked at from the point of view of testing alone — considering that the only real problem in programming is getting the program to work correctly and proving it.

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.

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

"One of my clients told me the story of the optimist and the pessimist who were arguing about philosophy. The optimist declares,"This is the best of all possible worlds." The pessimist sighs and says, "You're right.

Linear models tend to define relationships in terms of roles rather than people: the boss rather than the person actually exerting influence. The organic model tends to define relationships in terms of one unique person to another unique person.

A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he is going to be trying to prove that the program is correct — even if this means the oversight of errors which are monstrous to another eye. All programmers are familiar with the symptoms of this dissonance resolution — -in others, of course.

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

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

Since nobody's perfect, we need resistance to test our ideas.

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.