Software design Quote by Michael T. Nygard
““Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn’t address the converse—things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.””
About This Quote
Source Book: Release It! Software Design and Deployment, Michael T. Nygard, 2007
Software design often ignores what systems must avoid, leading to failures like crashes, data loss, and privacy breaches.
In simple terms: Design must prevent failures.
Key Takeaway
Plan for what can go wrong.
Themes
software design
risk management
failure prevention
Mood
concerned
practical
Type
technical
advisory
When to use this quote
- product development
- operations
- security audits
Key Concepts
system reliability
security
data integrity
Questions to Reflect On
- What failure modes have you overlooked?
- How can you embed safeguards early?
A Different Perspective
cautionary
![“What [software] must not do is not the inverse of what it must do. .” quote by Nancy Leveson](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/cf5/nancy-leveson-56176_inverse_what-software-must-not-do-is-not-the-inv_1537245.jpg)
![“It should never be possible for an administrator to break objects associations inside the application [he's talking about Spring dependency injection]. That's just wearing your guts on the outside. Whenever possible, keep production configuration properties separate from the basic wiring and…” quote by Michael T. Nygard](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/ae5/michael-t-nygard-51500_sooner-or-later_it-should-never-be-possible-for-an-admin_3065838.jpg)
![“Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!” quote by Edsger Dijkstra](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/6ad/edsger-dijkstra-5102_believe_please-don-t-fall-into-the-trap-of-belie_167695.jpg)
