Gerald Weinberg Quotes

We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM's ServiceBureau Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or assumed it as totally natural. I do remember Herb Jacobs (primarily, though we all participated) developing a large simulation for Motorola, where the technique used was, as far as I can tell, indistinguishable from XP.

I believe, however, that humans are the only animals that we know who invents tools for working together - and they have done that as long as we have considered them human.

The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

The power of the Ten Commandments is magnified if you remember the Helpful Model: No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful.

When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language."

Helping myself is even harder than helping others.

The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.

Quality is value to some person

If the software doesn't have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.

If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals.

Science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things.