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Martin Fowler Quotes

born 1963 England

Martin Fowler (born 18 December 1963) is a British software engineer, author and international speaker on software development, specializing in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.

England
Bloggers
Engineers
Non-fiction authors

Also known as: Fowler, Martin

Random Martin Fowler quote

12 quotes

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

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

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

Fowler (2003)

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 (2012)

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

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility

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.

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 objects.

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

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 to avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.

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

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

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Martin Fowler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.