Top 30 Steve McConnell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Good code is its own best documentation.”

— Steve McConnell

Featured in: Programming Quotes

2. “The trouble with quick and dirty is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten.”

— Steve McConnell

3. “Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, “How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?” Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.”

— Steve McConnell

4. “It’s better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.”

— Steve McConnell

Featured in: Programming Quotes

5. “The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a project’s targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them.”

— Steve McConnell

6. “A brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn’t work.”

— Steve McConnell

7. “It’s OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn’t need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.”

— Steve McConnell

8. “In software, the chain isn’t as strong as its weakest link; it’s as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.”

— Steve McConnell

9. “Engineering is the application of scientific principles toward practical ends. If the engineering isn’t practical, it’s bad engineering.”

— Steve McConnell

10. “The job of the average manager requires a shift in focus every few minutes. The job of the average software developer requires that the developer not shift focus more often than every few hours.”

— Steve McConnell

11. “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

12. “Software projects fail for one of two general reasons: the project team lacks the knowledge to conduct a software project successfully, or the project team lacks the resolve to conduct a project effectively.”

— Steve McConnell

13. “A blanket attempt to avoid mistakes is the biggest mistake of all.”

— Steve McConnell

14. “There are no secrets on an successful software project. Both good and bad news must be able to move up and down the ptoject hierarchy without restriction.”

— Steve McConnell

15. “Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program.”

— Steve McConnell

16. “Heuristic is an algorithm in a clown suit. It’s less predictable, it’s more fun, and it comes without a 30-day, money-back guarantee.”

— Steve McConnell

17. “Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation.”

— Steve McConnell

18. “Choose your battles. If rapid development is truly top priority, don’t shackle your developers by insisting on too many priorities at once.”

— Steve McConnell

19. “Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it’s so important that Software’s Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity. Complexity is not a new feature of software development.”

— Steve McConnell

20. “One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you’d like an error to be noticeable – you’d rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you’d rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully.”

— Steve McConnell

21. “Motivation is undoubtedly the single greatest influence on how well people perform. Most productivity studies have found that motivation has a stronger influence on productivity than any other factor.”

— Steve McConnell

22. “The only way to reduce the variability in the estimate is to reduce the variability in the project.”

— Steve McConnell

23. “Trying to apply formal methods to all software projects is just as bad as trying to apply code-and-fix development to all projects.”

— Steve McConnell

24. “A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime.”

— Steve McConnell

25. “The goal is to minimize the amount of a program you have to think about at any one time. You might think of this as mental juggling – the more mental balls the program requires you to keep in the air at once, the more likely you’ll drop one of the balls, leading to a design or coding error.”

— Steve McConnell

26. “People who are effective at developing high-quality software have spent years accumulating dozens of techniques, tricks, and magic incantations. The techniques are not rules; they are analytical tools.”

— Steve McConnell

27. “When executives ask for an “estimate,” they’re often asking for a commitment or for a plan to meet a target.”

— Steve McConnell

28. “Try to create modules that depend little on other modules. Make them detached, as business associates are, rather than attached, as Siamese twins are.”

— Steve McConnell

29. “The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.”

— Steve McConnell

30. “The default movement on a software project should be in the direction of taking elements of the software away to make it simpler rather than adding elements to make it more complex.”

— Steve McConnell

31. “In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.”

— Steve McConnell

32. “Study after study has shown that motivation probably has a larger effect on productivity and quality than any other factor.”

— Steve McConnell

33. “As Thomas Hobbes observed in the 17th century, life under mob rule is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Life on a poorly run software project is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and hardly ever short enough.”

— Steve McConnell

34. “95% on content and the computer language remains the same.”

— Steve McConnell