Martin Fowler Quotes

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

  Martin Fowler

  Ifs

  "Evolutionary Design: A Conversation with Martin Fowler, Part III". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. November 18, 2002.

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

  Martin Fowler

  Inspirational, Funny, Humorous

  Jay Fields, Shane Harvie, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck (2009). “Refactoring: Ruby Edition”, p.36, Pearson Education

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• Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.

  Martin Fowler

  Enemy

  Twitter post from Mar 30, 2016

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

  Martin Fowler

  Team, Issues, Software

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

  Martin Fowler

  Needs, Ifs

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

  Martin Fowler

  Order, Lazy, Prepared

  Martin Fowler, Kent Beck (1999). “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code”, p.90, Addison-Wesley Professional

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

  Martin Fowler

  Use, Development, Want

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

  Martin Fowler

  Red Flags, Made, Method

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• I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed

  Martin Fowler

  Writing, Tests, Bugs

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• 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.

  Martin Fowler

  Views, Littles, Cases

  Jay Fields, Shane Harvie, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck (2009). “Refactoring: Ruby Edition”, p.75, Pearson Education

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

  Martin Fowler

  Ideas, Patterns, Practicals

  Martin Fowler (1997). “Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models”, p.8, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• 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.

  Martin Fowler

  Team, Errors, Practice

  "Continuous Integration". www.martinfowler.com. May 01, 2006.

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

  Martin Fowler

  Danger, Process, Bigs

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

  Martin Fowler

  Engineering, Lines, Software

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Martin Fowler

  Writing, Thinking, Feedback

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

  Martin Fowler

  Care, Action, I Can

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

  Martin Fowler

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts (2012). “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code”, p.59, Addison-Wesley

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• I've learned to always avoid saying "always"

  Martin Fowler

  I've Learned

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• 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.

  Martin Fowler

  Thinking, Design, Trying

  "Design Principles and Code Ownership". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. November 11, 2002.

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

  Martin Fowler

  Use, Answers, Helping

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• 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.

  Martin Fowler

  Thinking, Symphony, People

  "Evolutionary Design". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. November 18, 2002.

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• 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.

  Martin Fowler

  Community, Tools, Rubies

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