Martin Fowler
Chief scientist at Thoughtworks and author of Refactoring, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Refactoring: Ruby Edition. His bliki at martinfowler.com has been the reference text on refactoring, testing and architecture for two decades.
Martin Fowler did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
-
Their wordsWell, nothing has hit with the magnitude of AI. That's I mean, this is a a whole size difference from anything that we've faced before.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 3rd of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsbut the thing about AI is that, you know, all of many of these things we were talking about how important they were and how valuable were and trying to persuade people of the importance of them. Yes, even the internet. That may sound surprising, but there were people who would weren't thinking that was important. Um but AI, there's kind of no argument about how important it is. People can't can I mean, you cannot put blinkers on to deny the importance of this thing.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 4th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsMy skepticism has to be absolute and total, which means I have to be skeptical about my skepticism. And that requires that curiosity.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 5th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsone of the things that I took from that was to use this tool well, you have to learn how to use it well, which was also something very true of object orientation.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 7th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsUm I think another similarity is I mean, the core notions uh behind Agile and extreme programming are solid and good, but a huge snake oil industry appeared around it, the Agile industrial complex as I like to refer to it. Um and that will happen. That is happening with AI right now, and it's often hard to see the difference between where is the snake oil and where is the real stuff.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 9th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsI go to myself, "Well, yeah, but what do you mean by code?" Because that kind of implies nobody's writing anything. Well, we're at least doing some prompting. We're having some interaction with the genie. What's that going to be if it's not some form of code in some way? I think the nature of what code is is going to be quite possibly for a very radically different. But I think there is still a need to produce it and be able to interact with it in some way.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 12th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsUm at the moment large-scale confusion and panic is pretty much the order of the day right across the board.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 13th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsI am very much concerned we're going to have some really bad security incidents um over this year because people are just not paying attention.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 14th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordsMy bet is on the more effective two pizza teams. Um and it it's also some interesting, you know, feedback we're beginning to get in terms of pair programming. I mean, with pair programming, do you say pair programming is the human and the genie? Or is it two humans and and genies? Because if it's two of us, we can control the genies perhaps a little bit better.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 17th of 20 in this recording
-
Their wordswhich is that the the Venn diagram of developer experience and agent experience is a circle. And the point here is that, you know, what we do that that's good for the agents is good for the humans and vice versa. I'm hearing a lot of feedback saying, "Yeah, actually, if you have well-modularized code, that actually makes it easy for the agents to work with."
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 19th of 20 in this recording
- 7 years earlier
-
Their wordsWith this article I'll explain that this trade-off does not apply to software - that high quality software is actually cheaper to produce.
↗Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?martinfowler.com 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsDevelopers find poor quality code significantly slows them down within a few weeks.
↗Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?martinfowler.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordseven the finest teams will inevitably create some cruft as they work
↗Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?martinfowler.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 years earlier
-
Their wordsAlmost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up
-
Their wordsThis leads to a powerful argument for a monolith-first strategy, where you should build a new application as a monolith initially, even if you think it's likely that it will benefit from a microservices architecture later on.
-
Their wordsBut even experienced architects working in familiar domains have great difficulty getting boundaries right at the beginning.
- 3 years earlier
-
Our reading
Test coverage is a tool for finding untested code and says nothing about how good the tests are.
Their wordsTest coverage is of little use as a numeric statement of how good your tests are.
-
Their wordsIf you make a certain level of coverage a target, people will try to attain it. The trouble is that high coverage numbers are too easy to reach with low quality testing.
-
Their wordsI would be suspicious of anything like 100% - it would smell of someone writing tests to make the coverage numbers happy, but not thinking about what they are doing.
- 9 years earlier
-
Their wordsthe reason we can't measure productivity is because we can't measure output
↗CannotMeasureProductivitymartinfowler.com 1st of 2 in this piece
-
Their wordsAny good developer knows that they can code the same stuff with huge variations in lines of code, furthermore code that's well designed and factored will be shorter because it eliminates the duplication.
↗CannotMeasureProductivitymartinfowler.com 2nd of 2 in this piece