The Ultimate List of 100 Software Testing Quotes
A list of great quotes around software testing from experts and thought leaders.
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Join For FreeSometimes metaphors and analogies simply say it best. That’s why we love to read software testing quotes because they reveal many truths about our unique discipline. From humorous to insightful, here is our ultimate list of 100 software testing quotes. We’ve included quotes from figures like Dorothy Graham and James Bach on topics spanning everything from finding bugs to test management. I recommend bookmarking this page so you can quickly whip out a quote whenever you need one. I know that whenever I write a blog post for Abstracta US, I am always looking for a good, relevant quote. Feel free to share these, use them in presentations and web pages, or make tweets out of them!
A special thanks to Mike Lyles for contributing some quotes from Michael Bolton and Karen N. Johnson! We also managed to scan the web and added one of your own.
Quotes about Quality
1. “Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.”— DeMarco and Lister
2. “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”— Benjamin Franklin
3. “Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”— Aristotle
4. “Software never was perfect and won’t get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality.”— Boris Beizer
5. “Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter.”— Melissa Meyer, Yahoo! CEO
6. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”— Steve Jobs
8. “…Quality debt focuses on the impact of implementation and quality decisions on the end user and business; how those decisions affect their ability to do their day-to day-job.”— Jordan Setters
9. “Quality means doing it right even when no one is looking.”— Henry Ford
10. “Fast, good, cheap: pick any two.”— Anonymous
Software Testing Quotes
11. “Testers don’t like to break things; they like to dispel the illusion that things work.”— Kaner, Bach, Pettichord
12. “You can see a lot by just looking.”— Yogi Berra
13. “Pretty good testing is easy to do (that’s partly why some people like to say ‘testing is dead’– they think testing isn’t needed as a special focus because they note that anyone can find at least some bugs some of the time). Excellent testing is quite hard to do.”— James Bach
14. “A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.”— James Thurber
15. “Testing is not responsible for the bugs inserted into software any more than the sun is responsible for creating dust in the air.”— Dorothy Graham
16. “To those who say that “if you need testing at the end, you’re doing it wrong”, would you prefer a Boeing, or are you going Air Icarus?”— Michael Bolton
17. “The problem is not that testing is the bottleneck. The problem is that you don’t know what’s in the bottle. That’s a problem that testing addresses.“— Michael Bolton
19. “I am pretty sure there is a difference between “this has not been proven” and “this is false.”— Ron Jeffries
20. “Testing is a skill. While this may come as a surprise to some people it is a simple fact.”— Fewster and Graham
21. “You can be a great tester if you have programming skills. You can also be a great tester if you have no programming skills at all. And, you can be a lousy tester with or without programming skills. A great tester will learn what skills she needs to continue to be great, in her own style.”— Jerry Weinberg
22. “No amount of testing can prove a software right, a single test can prove a software wrong.”— Amir Ghahrai
23. “Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.“— George E. P. Box
24. “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘Now that’s funny…'”— Isaac Asimov
25. “Testing is an infinite process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous in order to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous.”— James Bach
26. “We only see what we know.”— Goethe
27. “Pay attention to zeros. If there is a zero, someone will divide by it.”@DRCEMKANER
28. “The more effort I put into testing the product conceptually at the start of the process, the less I effort I had to put into manually testing the product at the end because less bugs would emerge as a result.”— Trish Khoo
29. “I do believe it’s important for testers to know the market that their client or their employer is in and the reason for that is if you understand what risks your client is facing and you understand what the competing products are and where the challenges lie in the market, you can plan your testing accordingly.”— Karen N. Johnson
30. “I think when you hear the phrase ‘it’s just test code’. To me that’s a code smell.”— Alan Page
31. “Testers don’t break software, software is already broken.”— Amir Gahrai
32. “Documents are the corpse of knowledge.”— Rick Bradley
33. “Just because you’ve counted all the trees doesn’t mean you’ve seen the forest.”— Anonymous
34. “As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.”— Dave Parnas
35. “It’s not at all important to get it right the first time. It’s vitally important to get it right the last time.”— Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
36. “Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.”— Norman Ralph Augustine
37. “Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.”@BURTRUTAN
Quotes About Bugs
38. “If we want to be serious about quality, it is time to get tired of finding bugs and start preventing their happening in the first place.”— Alan Page
39. “More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known.”— Boris Beizer
40. “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”— Brian W. Kernighan
41. “When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.”— Richard Pattis
42. “It’s hard enough to find an error in your code when you’re looking for it; it’s even harder when you’ve assumed your code is error-free.”— Steve McConnell
43. “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”— Donald Knuth
Quotes About Performance
44. “Just as athletes can’t win without a sophisticated mixture of strategy, form, attitude, tactics, and speed, performance engineering requires a good collection of metrics and tools to deliver the desired business results.”— Todd DeCapua
45. “If an end user perceives bad performance from your website, her next click will likely be on your-competition.com.”― Ian Molyneaux
Quotes About Automation
46. “Also common is the test automation group zombie. This zombie is the practice of assigning test automation to a dedicated team of test automators. The appeal is that we can keep developers focused on writing new code instead of writing and maintaining automated tests. The danger is that test automation inevitably lags development, so feedback from testing is delayed in a way that significantly reduces its value.”— Dale Emery
47. “Automation does not do what testers used to do, unless one ignores most things a tester really does. Automated testing is useful for extending the reach of the testers work, not to replace it.”— James Bach
48. “It’s automation, not automagic.”JIM HAZENClick to tweet
Funny Quotes
49. “Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.”— Fyodor Dostoevsky, courtesy ofElena Houser’s blog
50. “Where is the ‘any’ key?”— Homer Simpson
51. “f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n sftwr tstng.”— Anonymous
52. “To an optimist, the glass is half full. To a pessimist, the glass is half empty. To a good tester, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”— Anonymous
53. “Irreproducible bugs become highly reproducible right after delivery to the customer.”— Michael Stahl’s derivative of Murphy’s Law
54. “Q: How many testers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None, they just tell you that the room is dark.”— Anonymous
55. “All code is guilty until proven innocent.”— Anonymous
56. “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.”— Emo Philips
57. “If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.”@LINUS_TORVALDS
58. “Software and cathedrals are much the same: first we build them, then we pray.”— Anonymous
59. “First law of Bad Management: If something isn’t working, do more of it.”— DeMarco
60. “The only system which is truly secure is one which is switched off and unplugged, locked in a titanium lined safe, buried in a concrete bunker, and is surrounded by nerve gas and very highly paid armed guards. Even then, I wouldn’t stake my life on it.”— Gene Spafford
61. “Silicon Valley is the QA department for the rest of the world. It’s where you test out new business models.”— James Cham
62. “Alpha is simply that you want somebody to share your pain!”— Anonymous
63. “Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.”— Anonymous
64. “Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.”— Kreitzberg and Shneiderman
65. “The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”— Bill Gates
66. “There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”— Anonymous
67. “The internet? That thing is still around?”— Homer Simpson
68. “I think it’s a new feature. Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.”— Larry Wall
69. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”— Edward V. Berard
70. “I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!”— Vidiu Platon
Quotes About Software
71. “As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world.”— Jerry Weinberg
72. “If the software doesn’t have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.”— Jerry Weinberg
73. “A system is never finished being developed until it ceases to be used.”@JERRYWEINBERG
74. “Software is like entropy: It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.”— Norman Augustine
75. “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”— Nathan Myhrvold
76. “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”— Tom Cargill
77. “It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.”— Craig Bruce
78. “Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”— Donald Knuth
79. “First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.”— John Johnson
80. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”— Martin Fowler
Quotes About Tools
81. “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”@GRADY_BOOCH
82. “Just like with everything else, tools won’t give you good results unless you know how, when, and why to apply them. If you go out and you buy the most expensive frying pan on the market it’s still not going to make you a good chef.”— Christin Wiedemann
83. “He who thinks a tool can solve all problems, has a new problem.”— Federico Toledo
Quotes about Testers and Developers
84. “We have as many testers as we have developers. And testers spend all their time testing, and developers spend half their time testing. We’re more of a testing, a quality software organization than we’re a software organization.”— Bill Gates
85. “A great tester gives programmers immediate feedback on what they did right and what they did wrong. Believe it or not, one of the most valuable features of a tester is providing positive reinforcement. There is no better way to improve a programmer’s morale, happiness, and subjective sense of well-being than a La Marzocco Linea espresso machine to have dedicated testers who get frequent releases from the developers, try them out, and give negativeand positive feedback.”-– Joel Spolsky
86. “I remember the days when QA testers were treated almost as second-class citizens and developers ruled the software world. But as it recently occurred to me: we’re all testers now.” —Joe Colantonio
87. “Testing has to be an integral part of developing software and not a separate phase. When this approach is taken, product quality is owned by everyone on the team. It is easy to state, but hard to put into practice because of long-standing preconceived notions that developers and testers are better kept apart.”— James Sivak
Quotes About Management
88. “Think outside the thought leadership to avoid being a thought follower. Adopting a good idea means you’ll still evaluate the next one.”— Lanette Creamer
89. “‘Industry Best Practice’ is more likely to mean industry lowest common denominator.”JASON YIP
90. “Having a testing specialist on the team is a valuable asset, but the role of a specialist isn’t to restrict that responsibility to a single person.”— Trish Khoo
91. “The key to building a great product is building a great team first. To me, great teams aren’t bound by roles, but they’re driven by moving forward.”— Alan Page
92. “While we may understand the problem, it is critical for us to change our thinking, our practices, and continuously evolve to stay ahead of the problems we face.”— Mike Lyles
93. “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”— Albert Einstein
94. “The more you improve the way you go about your work, the harder the work will be.”— Lister, DeMarco
95. “Ever Tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”— Samuel Beckett
96. “Earning the “annoying” label for asking questions is ok, but becoming “annoying” via your response to their answers isn’t.”— Scott Barber
97. “I’m pretty much convinced that if you want a team to go fast, a feeling of momentum is more important than a sense of urgency.” —Elisabeth Hendrickson
98. “If we fail, we fall. If we succeed – then we will face the next task.”— Gandalf (Tolkien)
100. “When a flower doesn’t bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”— Alexander Den Heijer via Anne-Marie Charrett
Last But Not Least
Here is a bonus quote from our favorite performance testing guru, Scott Barber:
101. “Only conducting performance testing at the conclusion of system or functional testing is like conducting a diagnostic blood test on a patient who is already dead.”— Scott Barber
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