Kent Beck
Creator of Extreme Programming, Co-authored the Agile Manifesto
Kent Beck
Creator of Extreme Programming, Co-authored the Agile Manifesto
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of Extreme Programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto.
Beck pioneered Test-Driven Development, it's successor TCR: Test && Commit || Revert, software design patterns, and 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract. He wrote the SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, which spawned the xUnit series of frameworks, notably JUnit for Java, which Beck wrote with Erich Gamma. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki.
He lives in San Francisco, California and in his leisure time he is an artist, writer, baker, and avid poker player.
Upcoming masterclasses featuring Kent Beck
Tidy Together: A Software Design Workshop
Software design is an exercise in human relationships. Yes, it has its technical constraints. Mastering those techniques to resolve those constraints will improve the resulting designs. But the design only learns at the pace of the people living within that design.
In this workshop we will examine software design through various lenses:
- Economic. Software design increases the option value of software.
- Social. Software design as community learning & change.
- Statistical. The curious prevalence & enormous implications of Pareto distributions in software.
- Practical. Making large changes through small, safe steps.
- Managerial. How to manage the change of a software design.
Exercises include:
- Tidying. The smallest changes of design.
- Refactoring. Changing design smoothly while maintaining a flow of new features.
- Code review & design. Separating commits into pure behavior change & pure structure change.
- Analysis. Finding & understanding the implications of distributions in software.
Come prepared to program.
Reserve your spot now
Content featuring Kent Beck

From XP to TCR & Limbo

Tidy First? A Daily Exercise in Empirical Design

Tidy First? A Daily Exercise in Empirical Design

From Extreme Programming to TCR and Limbo
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