Kent Beck
Creator of extreme programming and test-driven development, an original signatory of the Agile Manifesto, and the author of Test-Driven Development: By Example and Tidy First?
Kent Beck did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsMy response is that that's a statement by someone who doesn't understand software engineering. Coding is part of what you're doing, but it's only a small part of what you're doing.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 1st of 28 in this recording
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code generationsoftware quality
Their wordswe're accumulating code faster than we're accumulating trust and that sense of trust comes from me struggling to understand some domain concept I get it. I represent it in the code. I have I write tests that demonstrate that I really did understand it. And now I trust my program.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 2nd of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsSo I was promised just understand the computer and then just kidding understand people from a position where I was already 10 years behind.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 3rd of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsYou look under the underneath though at the code and it was just a horrible unmaintainable mess. But the fact that people could program the programs that they wanted was a a significant step forward as opposed to I'm going to write a thousandpage requirements document and then wait 8 years and not get what I want which was the alternative that we were offering at the at the time.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 4th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordspart of the goal of programs is to communicate intent to other human beings and now to models as well which which is a much more open-ended problem. We understand a lot more about how to communicate to other human beings whether we apply that understanding or not. We don't understand at all how to communicate effectively to models
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 5th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsYour understanding of somebody else's problem is bounded because you're not in the middle of it. You don't have the same skin in the game. If you're not semiconductor test engineer, you don't have as much skin in the game as somebody who is because they're going to have to be using this interface for a long time after you're gone.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 6th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsSo a a big challenge in object-oriented programming is dividing the responsibilities because you're moving the computation to where the data is. Saying, "Well, this object does this and that object does that is a really critical decision because you want to you want the computation near to the data so that there's less coupling between them." which is a lesson that I I think uh kind of got lost in the noise. That's the fundamental design move in ob in designing object-oriented programs and I I think I stand behind that.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 7th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsSo beforehand because of this social divide between programmers and testers. There was a lot of incentive for the testers to have their own language. This is my tool. I know how to run it. I'm going to run it.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 8th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsand I thought programming sitting fingers on keyboard staring at code that's that's where I do my learning because that's where you can no longer fool yourself that you actually understand either you compute the correct value or you don't compute the correct value. So I wanted to elevate that moment of reality meets program and that's where the programming comes from.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 9th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsAlways try your stupid ideas if you can do it cheaply and reversibly. Jumping off a bridge is not a reversible decision. Not talking about that. I'm talking about stuff like this where you're just like, "Here's a stupid idea." 99 times out of a 100 it'll fail. But that one time you won't have any competition cuz nobody else is stupid enough to try this idea.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 10th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsIt costs tokens in the short run, but it can save them in the long run because one of the classic genie mistakes is stuff doesn't work.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 11th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd then there were people who used it as a moral cudgel. Like you should be if you're not using TDD, you're not professional. And that's just such People can write very good software with a wide variety of workflows.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 12th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's when you have this rapid alternation between I do a thing, I learn a thing, I do a thing, I learn a thing, I do a thing, I learn a thing. That's where TDD is really powerful. But it's not a moral decision. It's a practical decision.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 13th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordswhat I don't like about it I didn't like about it then and still don't like about it is it's not defensible. Nobody's going to say I'm not agile. Oh no, I prefer rigid development. Oh, I prefer inflexible development. No, everybody's going to say that they're agile, which extreme doesn't have that problem.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 14th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsThe agile manifesto is the intersection of the ideas of the people in the room. I think there's a lot more to software development than is contained in the manifesto. And I've written books and books and books about what I think those things are.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 15th of 28 in this recording
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Our reading
Promising twice the work in half the time without the hard-won technical skills is simply a lie.
Their wordsAnd there were people who were willing to say, "Nah, no, no, don't worry about that. This is easy. You can do this. Anybody can do this. Twice the work in half the time." From my perspective, that's just a lie.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 16th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd what I had to learn was the reason that people come to me with those out of proportion responses is because that's what they need. They need a hero or they need a villain. and their need for a hero or a villain has nothing to do with me. If it wasn't me, they'd be contacting you. They'd be contacting somebody else. It really doesn't have anything to to do about me.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 17th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsThen you had code review which gave you another level of feedback. You could roll out internally more frequently. And everybody was using Facebook for all kinds of stuff, personal and internal business stuff. So whatever feature you developed, people would start using it immediately. So you get another round of feedback. Then we had this phased roll out process where you'd start rolling your stuff out. If there was a problem, the blast radius would be limited to a a few million people.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 18th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you accomplished everything you set out to accomplish, people, you know, you're sandbagging. you're not trying hard enough. You're not risking enough. You didn't learn anything over the course of the six months.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 19th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's not always pleasant. It's not a pat you on the head and you're going to be fine. It's a It's a don't like no, you're screwing this up. Go try this thing. Tell me how that works. Oh, you didn't try the thing. Oh, you don't want to work on this? Okay, we're done. Quite uncompromising. uh I say coaches are are there to identify and induce productive discomfort
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 20th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsThere are people who say, "Well, it's up to the rest of the world to adapt to the ways that I'm weird." It's just not because I mean, it's not going to happen. So, learning empathy, learning how to read body language, learning how to read tone of voice, this is not natural skills, but they're skills. They're learnable.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 21st of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsSo one of the things is that the pace of development is definitely accelerated. One thing I wonder the pace of business hasn't accelerated though and that mismatch is going to become more and more apparent.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 22nd of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsOkay. So now we have people who've been able to rely on switching costs to protect their profits and the switching costs just drop to zero. Their profits are going to drop to zero and and some people aren't going to survive that change.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 23rd of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, we're going to see people get into those where they're like, "Well, I vibe code the tip of the iceberg. I throw away the rest of the iceberg and now I'm in trouble because now I don't know what to do. Now I get to these downstream problems that I didn't even know existed." So, we're going to see on the on the side of the the the vibe coding replacers, we're going to see that kind of a naivity play out.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 24th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsSo how you write code, how you manage projects, who you hire, how many people, what the org structure is is completely different in the three phases.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 25th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsNobody knows now. That playbook has been wiped clean and people whose identity is I know the playbook are now terrified. Who who am I? Now, it turns out that the skill of writing a playbook is completely different than the skill of applying a playbook.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 26th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordswhich is why when I see manifestos today I'm just like too soon. Not a bad idea. Would love to have one just too soon. It took 15 years for the technical change of object-oriented programming to come before we could say here are the consequences of it. Here's how in a simple way we can express how to effectively use this technology that we've been using day in and day out for 15 years. The genie comes along. People are like, "Well, what's the new manifesto? It's just not manifesto time yet.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 27th of 28 in this recording
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Their wordsthe genie runs out of g runs itself out of options it can't make further forward progress and so I'll wipe it away start over I won't try and tweak I'll start over and say all right well if I implement things in a different order. If I implement with this markdown file or if I implement it with this commit hook, we collectively need to try absolutely everything.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 28th of 28 in this recording
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsAnd one of the things I noticed is for 25 years we've kind of had the answers. Somebody comes to us and says we have too many bugs or like, all right, well, here's how you write tests. Oh, I can't write tests. Well, here's how you design so you can write tests. It's just kind of press play uh on the recorder. And the thing that's changed is at this moment nobody knows the answers to anything.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 1st of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, as seniors, I figure it behooves us to demonstrate not just how to use these tools effectively, but how to figure out how to use these tools effectively, cuz that's a whole different set of skills.
↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 2nd of 20 in this recording