Martin Fowler Quotes (18 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Martin Fowler: 18 quotes1 like

Famous Martin Fowler Quotes

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

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

“Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them.”

Martin Fowler

Fowler (2003) in: Software development. Vol. 11. p. 99

“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.”

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 33-43 as cited in: Militiadis Lytras, Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos, Ernesto Damiani (2011) Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness. p. 111

“Often you'll see the same three or four data items together in lots of places: fields in a couple of classes, parameters in many method signatures. Bunches of data that hang around together really ought to be made into their own object.”

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 81

“Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful.”

Martin Fowler

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 2

“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.”

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 7

Martin Fowler Quotes

“Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language. By far the most common of the three, at least to my biased eye, is UML as sketch. In this usage, developers use the UML to help communicate some aspects of a system. As with blueprints, you can use sketches in a forward-engineering or reverse-engineering direction. Forward engineering draws a UML diagram before you write code, while reverse engineering builds a UML diagram from existing code in order to help understand it.”

Martin Fowler

Source: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, 2004, p. 2

“It is commonly said that a pattern, however it is written, has four essential parts: a statement of the context where the pattern is useful, the problem that the pattern addresses, the forces that play in forming a solution, and the solution that resolves those forces. … it supports the definition of a pattern as "a solution to a problem in a context", a definition that [unfortunately] fixes the bounds of the pattern to a single problem-solution pair”

Martin Fowler

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 6

“Graphical design notations have been with us for a while… their primary value is in communication and understanding. A good diagram can often help communicate ideas about a design, particularly when you want to avoid a lot of details. Diagrams can also help you understand either a software system or a business process. As part of a team trying to figure out something, diagrams both help understanding and communicate that understanding throughout a team. Although they aren't, at least yet, a replacement for textual programming languages, they are a helpful assistant… Of these graphical notations, the UML's importance comes from its wide use and standardization within the OO development community. The UML has become not only the dominant graphical notation within the OO world but also a popular technique in non-OO circles.”

Martin Fowler

Source: UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling, 2004, p. xxvi

“The second problem [with using UML for the purposes of this book] is that the Unified Modeling Language concentrates on implementation modeling rather than conceptual modeling”

Martin Fowler

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 314

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

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler (2012) Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

“The key is to test the areas that you are most worried about going wrong. That way you get the most benefit for your testing effort. It is better to write and run incomplete tests than not to run complete tests”

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 98.

“The definition I use for pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others”

Martin Fowler

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 8

“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.”

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler at refactoring.com as cited in: Lawrence Bernstein, C. M. Yuhas (2005) Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative Software Engineering. p. 266

“Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility”

Martin Fowler

Source: UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling, 2004, p. 32

“When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.”

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 88

“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

Martin Fowler as cited in: James Shore, Shane Warden (2007) The Art of Agile Development. p. 319

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler (2002) as cited in Evolutionary Design: A Conversation with Martin Fowler, Part III by Bill Venners, November 18, 2002.