Design Principles and Patterns for Software Engineering with Microsoft .NET

  • 10/15/2008

Murphy’s Laws of the Chapter

This chapter is about design and proving that your design is effective and meets requirements. If you think of acceptance tests, in fact, how can you help but recall the original Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” We selected a few related laws for the chapter.

  • The chances of a program doing what it’s supposed to do are inversely proportional to the number of lines of code used to write it.

  • The probability of bugs appearing is directly proportional to the number and importance of people watching.

  • An expert is someone brought in at the last minute to share the blame.

See http://www.murphys-laws.com for an extensive listing of other computer-related (and non-computer-related) laws and corollaries.