Statements I have recently heard

I had an conversation recently with a number of folks; all of whom are having fairly consistent problems with their system's stability. Each of these statements come from individuals who make their living as a senior level developer or a manager of a team of developers.

Can you tell them why they are having problems?

These statements are from the same person:
"We don't have the time to test thoroughly and meet out deadlines. Besides the users are supposed to test."
"We test the application every which way from Sunday. Testing wouldn't have caught the [run-time] error."

As a note - the error was fundamental and a standard regression test of the module explicitly changed would have caught it (in my opinion).


Other great statements:
"Standards are just loose guidelines. As long as I can read the code and it works, it's good. I don't need to be picky." - responsible for team of 7 developers working on the same code base. The week prior to this statement, the system had crashed due to use of poorly scoped variables (something you often see covered in standards)

"Patterns (such as the GoF patterns) are a great theory, but we code in the real world." - HUH?

"We like to make fun of [insert name here]. He's a real stickler for standards and stuff." - responsible for team of 20+ developers all working on the same application - making reference to one of their own employees.

"We almost had to quit doing code reviews... people kept criticising each other's code." - one of my personal favorites