Home GOTO Experts Kent Beck

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 Masterclass

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.

Wednesday Dec 10 @ 09:00 | Sydney, Australia

Reserve your spot now

Upcoming conference sessions featuring Kent Beck

Sustainable Augmented Development

Genies are great at cranking out features. Unfortunately they don’t clean the kitchen as they cook. Progress slows then stops as yesterday’s expedient decision becomes today’s roadblock.

What would it take to get the trajectory in red instead of the one in blue?

  • Development in small steps validated by automated tests
  • Periodic pauses in feature development to improve structure and thus increase optionality
  • Potentially a new approach to augmented coding manipulating the tree structure of the code, not just the tokens

Sound familiar?

Thursday Dec 4 @ 09:00 @ YOW! Melbourne 2025

Get conference pass

Sustainable Augmented Development

Genies are great at cranking out features. Unfortunately they don’t clean the kitchen as they cook. Progress slows then stops as yesterday’s expedient decision becomes today’s roadblock.

What would it take to get the trajectory in red instead of the one in blue?

  • Development in small steps validated by automated tests
  • Periodic pauses in feature development to improve structure and thus increase optionality
  • Potentially a new approach to augmented coding manipulating the tree structure of the code, not just the tokens

Sound familiar?

Thursday Dec 11 @ 09:00 @ YOW! Sydney 2025

Get conference pass

Sustainable Augmented Development

Genies are great at cranking out features. Unfortunately they don’t clean the kitchen as they cook. Progress slows then stops as yesterday’s expedient decision becomes today’s roadblock.

What would it take to get the trajectory in red instead of the one in blue?

  • Development in small steps validated by automated tests
  • Periodic pauses in feature development to improve structure and thus increase optionality
  • Potentially a new approach to augmented coding manipulating the tree structure of the code, not just the tokens

Sound familiar?

Monday Dec 8 @ 09:00 @ YOW! Brisbane 2025

Get conference pass

Content featuring Kent Beck

39:56
From XP to TCR & Limbo
From XP to TCR & Limbo
GOTO Unscripted
57:13
Tidy First? A Daily Exercise in Empirical Design
Tidy First? A Daily Exercise in Empirical Design
GOTO Copenhagen 2024
51:37
Tidy First? A Daily Exercise in Empirical Design
Tidy First? A Daily Exercise in Empirical Design
GOTO Chicago 2024

Past masterclasses featuring Kent Beck

Tidy Together: A Software Design Workshop (Tuesday) | GOTO Copenhagen 2025

Tidy Together: A Software Design Workshop (Monday) | GOTO Copenhagen 2025

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