My 18 Favorite Quotes on Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery

Every once in a while, I see a great little quote on software automation that either makes me laugh, think, or nod my head in agreement. Here are 18 quotes read in blogs, seen on twitter or heard at conferences. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments below.

1. “The best TDD can do, is assure that code does what the programmer thinks it should do. That is pretty good BTW.” – James Grenning
2. “Simply put, things always had to be in a production-ready state: if you wrote it, you darn well had to be there to get it running!” – Mike Miller
3. “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.”
4. “Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you.” – John Carmack
5. “A phased approach to continuous delivery is not only preferable, it’s infinitely more manageable.” – Maurice Kherlakian
6. “So what do you do?” “I’m lean,” “What?”, “I’m agile,” “What?”, “Fine. I make websites.” - @iamdevloper
7. “Programmers don’t burn out on hard work, they burn out on change-with-the-wind directives and not ‘shipping’.” – Mark Berry
8. “The most powerful tool we have as developers is automation.” – Scott Hanselman
9. “The key in such a transition to continuous delivery is to expect things to get worse before you’ll be able to make them better.” – Matthias Marschal
10. “Currently, DevOps is more like a philosophical movement, not yet a precise collection of practices, descriptive or prescriptive”
11. “Any roles involved in a project that do not directly contribute toward the goal of putting valuable software in the hands of users as quickly as possible should be carefully considered.” – Stein Inge Morisbak
12. “Lack of trust in an organization is really expensive. You can’t villianize others if you know their kids.”
13. “To successfully implement continuous delivery, you need to change the culture of how an entire organization views software development efforts.” – Tommy Tynjä
14. “TDD creates consumption awareness: when you create a unit test, you are creating the first consumer of the code under development.” @neal4d
15. “If you adopt only one #agile practice, let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow.” @WoodyZuill
16. “The key to following the continuous delivery path is to continually question your own assumptions about what’s possible.” – Jeff Sussna
17. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin
18. “Showing a strong success and visible benefits is key to getting others to agree to try your way of doing things.” – Frederic Rivain