Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Developer Laws

Dave Kerr (via Gus Mueller):

There are lots of laws which people discuss when talking about development. This repository is a reference and overview of some of the most common ones.

For example: Amdahl’s Law about optimization, Brooks’ Law about staffing, and Tesler’s Law about complexity, along with principles such as the Liskov Substitution Principle, YAGNI, and The Fallacies of Distributed Computing.

A possible addition: the Lindy Effect.

Update (2020-03-27): Ryan Reeves:

Some great “laws.”

Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Betteridge’s Law: “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’”

Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Update (2020-07-30): See also: Laws for hackers to live by.

Update (2021-03-02): See also: 10 Software Engineering Laws Everybody Loves to Ignore (via Hacker News).

Update (2022-03-09): Tim Sommer (via Hacker News):

In this post I am going to share my collection, interpretation and thoughts on the most famous and most used laws in Software Development.

Comments RSS · Twitter

Leave a Comment