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Kent Beck Quotes
born 1961 United States
Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies, also named agile software development. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001.
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Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.
Extreme Programming Explained (2000)
When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby.
Kent Beck As cited in: Giles Bowkett (2007)
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.
The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.
Extreme Programming Explained (2000)
Often you'll see the same three or four data items together in lots of places: fields in a couple of classes, parameters in many method signatures. Bunches of data that hang around together really ought to be made into their own object.
The key is to test the areas that you are most worried about going wrong. That way you get the most benefit for your testing effort. It is better to write and run incomplete tests than not to run complete tests
XP (Extreme Programming) is a system of practices (you can use the m-word if you want to; we'd rather not, thank you) that a community of software developers is evolving to address the problems of quickly delivering quality software, and then evolving it to meet changing business needs.
& Martin Fowler (2001)
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