Performance quotes

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Robert_N_Britcher

Software Testing Completion Criteria

“Software is never completely fit. ... Testing should simply continue until all of the performance criteria have been met, including the failure rate.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 157.

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Flow

“In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “Flow Activities”, page 74. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Peter_Drucker

Arts

“The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...”
  • Source: Peter F. Drucker, “Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World”, New York: Harper & Row, 1959. p. 144.

Learning is Promise

“In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.”
  • Source: Peter F. Drucker, “Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World”, New York: Harper & Row, 1959. p. 144.

Subordinate Job

“The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.”
  • Source: Peter Drucker, “Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond” (1992). p. 138.

Parkinson_and_Margulieux

Spatial Skills

“Higher spatial reasoning skills universally correlate with better STEM [Science Technology Engineering Mathematics] performance and achievement... This correlation is particularly interesting because spatial skills can be trained, and spatial skills training globally improves STEM performance and achievement.”
  • Source: From the journal article entitled “Improving CS Performance by Developing Spatial Skills”, in Communications of the ACM, volume 68, number 1, 2025-01. DOI:10.1145/3680409.

Alan_Perlis

Useful Software Systems

“We recognize that a practical problem of considerable difficulty and importance has arisen: The successful design, production and maintenance of useful software systems. The importance is obvious and the more so since we see only greater growth in demands and requirements in the future. The consequences of poor performance, poor design, instability and mismatching of promise and performance are not going to be limited to the computing fraternity, or even their nearest neighbors, but will affect considerable sections of our society whose ability to forgive is inversely proportional to their ignorance of the difficulties we face. The source of difficulty is distributed through the whole problem, easy to identify, and yet its cure is hard to pinpoint so that systematic improvement can be gotten.”

Herbert_Simon

Markets and Coordination

“Markets aim to coordinate the decisions and behavior of multitudes of economic actors to guarantee that the quantity of brussels sprouts shipped to market bears some reasonable relation to the quantity that consumers will buy and eat, and that the price at which brussels sprouts can be sold bears a reasonable relation to the cost of producing them. Any society that is not a subsistence economy, but has substantial specialization and division of labor, needs mechanisms to perform this coordinative function. Markets are only one, however, among the spectrum of mechanisms of coordination on which any society relies. [central planning, bargaining and negotiation, business, government, education, balloting procedures]”

Gerald_Weinberg

Measuring Performance

“One consequence of the size of a large project is that performance becomes more difficult to measure. Part of this difficulty stems from the scale of things, which makes it impossible for a single mind to be making the judgment of all the parts.”
  • Source: Chapter 6. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Panopticon Coaching

“To be sure, some managers saw the enhanced certainty of their information about subordinates as an opportunity to accelerate learning and improve performance. They found that the data from the Overview System made it possible to survey a wide range of behavior for evidence of irregularities. To the extent that the sources of such irregularities could be discovered, the data could be used to 'coach' subordinates and to help them realign their behavior within acceptable standards... On the other hand, many of Cedar Bluff's managers were more interested in the possibility of obtaining foolproof data than in the opportunity of using such data for coaching. In the context of a conventional technology, managers had to rely on their subordinates for valid information. The quality of the data they received was likely to be a function of the quality of the reciprocal relationship they had established. In contrast, an informating technology could provide valid information under any conditions.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 324. ISBN:0465032125.