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.

Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.

Helping myself is even harder than helping others.

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.

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.

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

The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.

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

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

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.

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

A system is never finished being developed until it ceases to be used.

Let’s hope that no system of theory of systems will ever eliminate the other systems – that no approach will be promoted to a dogma, and no group of scientists will become the high priests. Shouldn’t we rather let a hundred flowers bloom...?

Quality is value to some person

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.