108 Quotes by Robert C. Martin

"Say what you mean. Mean what you say."

"Why do most developers fear to make continuous changes to their code? They are afraid they’ll break it! Why are they afraid they’ll break it? Because they don’t have tests."

"On the other hand, a system being developed by five different teams, each of which includes seven developers, cannot make progress unless the system is divided into well-defined components with reliably stable interfaces. If no other factors are considered, the architecture of that system will likely evolve into five components – one for each team."

"If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. – Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder."

"When you are working on a problem, you sometimes get so close to it that you can’t see all the options. You miss elegant solutions because the creative part of your mind is suppressed by the intensity of your focus. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to go home, eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and then wake up the next morning and take a shower."

"But there are different kinds of duplication. There is true duplication, in which every change to one instance necessitates the same change to every duplicate of that instance. Then there is false or accidental duplication. If two apparently duplicated sections of code evolve along different paths – if they change at different rates, and for different reasons – then they are not true duplicates. Return to them in a few years, and you’ll find that they are very different from each other."

"The problem is that we view estimates in different ways. Business likes to view estimates as commitments. Developers like to view estimates as guesses. The difference is profound."

"Programmers can practice in a similar fashion using a game known as ping-pong.8 The two partners choose a kata, or a simple problem. One programmer writes a unit test, and then the other must make it pass. Then they reverse roles."

"The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system."

"The cost of automating acceptance tests is so small in comparison to the cost of executing manual test plans that it makes no economic sense to write scripts for humans to execute."