Gerald M. Weinberg Quotes

Good testing involves balancing the need to mitigate risk against the risk of trying to gather too much information.

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.

you don’t have to be a boss to be a leader

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

It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. - Will Rogers The

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

problem-solving leaders have one thing in common: a faith that there’s always a better way

*No matter how strange it may look, most people are actually trying to be helpful.* That

In fact, the average programming manager would prefer that a project be estimated at twelve months and take twelve than that the same project be estimated at six months and take nine. This is an area where some psychological study could be rewarding, but there are indications from other situations that it is not the mean length of estimated time that annoys people but, rather, the standard deviation in the actual time taken. Thus, most people would prefer to wait a fixed ten minutes for the bus each morning than to wait one minute on four days and twenty-six minutes once a week-. Even though the average wait is six minutes in the second case, the derangement caused by one long and unexpected delay more than compensates for this disadvantage.

In this business, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius.

Much of the ability to help other people arises from personal power, but it would be naive to assert that nothing else is required. In large organizations, there are many resources available to a leader — money to pay for training, support staff, office space, tools to make work more efficient, access to helpful people. Such resources are not evenly distributed, and one of the requirements for becoming a problem-solving leader is to acquire organizational power so as to obtain resources for other innovators.

*Effective help can only start with mutual agreement on a clear definition of the problem.* Interestingly

"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. Make sure you're accounting for effort and time under the correct cost category."

• Do you think the outcome of testing will make your decisions for you? Business decisions cannot be made from a purely technical perspective. Certainly use information from testing to color your business decisions, but don't substitute testing for business decisions. For example, it can be a good business decision to ship a system that fails one or more tests. Conversely, it can be a bad business decision to ship a system that passes all your tests. Management has to consider other factors in addition to test results. • Conversely, is there any possible test outcome that would make you change your decisions? If not, why would you want to know the outcome, let alone pay for it?