Martin Fowler Quotes

British programmer

Martin Fowler (born 18 December 1963) is a British software engineer, author and international speaker on software development, specializing in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.

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When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardware.

Refactoring (noun): a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing the observable behavior of the software. To refactor (verb): to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing the observable behavior of the software.

People also underestimate the time they spend debugging. They underestimate how much time they can spend chasing a long bug. With testing, I know straight away when I added a bug. That lets me fix the bug immediately before it can crawl off and hide. There are few things more frustrating or time-wasting than debugging. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot quicker if we just didn't create the bugs in the first place?