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Kent Beck Quotes

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, the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development , of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.

Beck pioneered software design patterns, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. 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 worked at social media company Facebook. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. March 1961
Kent Beck photo
Kent Beck: 13   quotes 1   like

Famous Kent Beck Quotes

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Kent Beck

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”

Kent Beck

Kent Beck in: Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant (2012) Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code.

“Refactoring (noun) : a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing the observable behavior of the software.
To refactor (verb) : to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing the observable behavior of the software.”

Kent Beck

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 33-43 as cited in: Militiadis Lytras, Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos, Ernesto Damiani (2011) Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness. p. 111

“Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.”

Kent Beck

Source: Extreme Programming Explained (2000), p. 31

“When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.”

Kent Beck

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 88

“Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”

Kent Beck

Kent Beck Quotes

“I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby.”

Kent Beck

Kent Beck As cited in: Giles Bowkett (2007) " Smalltalk, Outside The Ivory Tower? http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.nl/2007/07/smalltalk-outside-ivory-tower.html". at Giles Bowkett.blogspot.com July 15, 2007

“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”

Kent Beck

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 98.

Way , Effort

“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.”

Kent Beck

Source: Extreme Programming Explained (2000), p. 28

Business , Problem , Change

“The new concept of Extreme Programming (XP) is gaining more and more acceptance, partially because it is controversial, but primarily because it is particularly well-suited to help the small software development team succeed… XP is controversial, many software development sacred cows don't make the cut in XP; it forces practitioners to take a fresh look at how software is developed.”

Kent Beck

Abstract
Extreme Programming Explained (2000)

Help

“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.”

Kent Beck

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 7

Way

“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.”

Kent Beck

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 81

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