Top 35 Martin Fowler Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Martin Fowler

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2. “I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed.”

— Martin Fowler

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3. “If you’re a technical lead, you need to be coding.”

— Martin Fowler

4. “The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing.”

— Martin Fowler

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

— Martin Fowler

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Martin Fowler

9. “Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.”

— Martin Fowler

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

— Martin Fowler

11. “Now I’m a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.”

— Martin Fowler

12. “Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code.”

— Martin Fowler

13. “I’ve learned to always avoid saying “always””

— Martin Fowler

14. “Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it’s dangerous when you use it to justify answers.”

— Martin Fowler

15. “One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can’t.”

— Martin Fowler

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

— Martin Fowler

17. “If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it’s doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the “what”.”

— Martin Fowler

18. “If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.”

— Martin Fowler

19. “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

20. “Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.”

— Martin Fowler

21. “I can’t choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care.”

— Martin Fowler

22. “I’ve found that refactoring helps me write fast software. It slows the software in the short term while I’m refactoring, but it makes the software easier to tune during optimization. I end up well ahead.”

— Martin Fowler

23. “You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization.”

— Martin Fowler

24. “Other than when you are very close to a deadline, however, you should not put off refactoring because you haven’t got time. Experience with several projects has shown that a bout of refactoring results in increased productivity. Not having enough time usually is a sign that you need to do some refactoring.”

— Martin Fowler

25. “Poorly designed code usually takes more code to do the same things, often because the code quite literally does the same thing in several places.”

— Martin Fowler

26. “A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead.”

— Martin Fowler

27. “It’s more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.”

— Martin Fowler

28. “Life being what it is, you won’t get your names right the first time. In this situation you may well be tempted to leave it – after all it’s only a name. That is the work of the evil demon Obfuscatis; don’t listen to him. If you see a badly named method, it is imperative that you change it. Remember your code is for a human first and a computer second. Humans need good names.”

— Martin Fowler

29. “People sometimes ask me what length I look for in a method. To me length is not the issue. The key is the semantic distance between the method name and the method body. If extracting improves clarity, do it, even if the name is longer than the code you have extracted.”

— Martin Fowler

30. “Parallel inheritance hierarchies is really a special case of shotgun surgery. In this case, every time you make a subclass of one class, you also have to make a subclass of another.”

— Martin Fowler

31. “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

32. “First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects!”

— Martin Fowler

33. “It reminds me of a statement Kent Beck often makes about himself: “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.” Refactoring helps me be much more effective at writing robust code.”

— Martin Fowler

34. “A statement Kent Beck often makes about himself, “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.”

— Martin Fowler

35. “Architectural refactoring is hard, and we’re still ignorant of its full costs, but it isn’t impossible. Here the best.”

— Martin Fowler