Martin Fowler Quotes

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

If you're afraid to change something it is clearly poorly designed.

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.

The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing.

If you're a technical lead, you need to be coding.

Now I'm a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed.

So I hope I’ve made clear that imposing agile methods is a very red flag.

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed

In almost all cases, I’m opposed to setting aside time for refactoring. In my view refactoring is not an activity you set aside time to do. Refactoring is something you do all the time in little bursts.

A pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others.

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.

One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can't.

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code

When you actually sit down to write some code, you learn things that you didn't get from thinking about them in modeling terms...there is a feedback process there that you can only really get at from executing some things and seeing what works

I can't choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care.

I can only think of so many good ideas in a week. Having other people contribute makes my life easier.

I've learned to always avoid saying "always"

One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers.

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

It is impossible not to notice Ruby on Rails. It has had a huge effect both in and outside the Ruby community... Rails has become a standard to which even well-established tools are comparing themselves to.