Top 18 Kent Beck Quotes

A rational model of software is to design it quickly – the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you’re ready to engineer.

People are looking for software development that actually does something useful… People are looking for partners who deliver when promised, and at a reasonable and transparent price. I believe that the days of being able to value price software are numbered.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don’t become apparent for years.

Received wisdom is that if you spend time up front getting the design right, you avoid costs later. But the longer you spend getting the design right, the more your upfront costs are, and the longer it takes for the software to start earning.

Whether you draw diagrams that generate code or you type at a browser, you are coding.

Developer testing is an important step towards accountability. It gives developers a way to demonstrate the quality of the software they produce.

The marketing of XP is very deliberate and conscious. Part of it is in co-opting the power of the media; I make sure I’m newsworthy from time to time. Part is in co-opting some of my publisher’s ad budget.

The world is changing, and I believe that, if I want to stay employed as a programmer, I’m going to have to change with it.

If I’d had a charisma-ectomy in the beginning, XP would have gone nowhere.

Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.

Design should be easy in the sense that every step should be obviously and clearly identifiable. Simplify elements to make change simple so you can manage the technical risk.

When Pandora doesn’t pay, and bars don’t pay, and weddings don’t pay, and nobody buys CDs or shirts or concert tickets or lessons, then the musician can’t make a living making music.

Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard lower the barriers to accountability in software development and increase the value of developer testing.

There’s a huge latent market for software development that’s just flat-out honest.

I think it’s a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

I lived near Santa Cruz for ten years, and the whole time, it bothered me what an exclusionary definition of ‘inclusion’ was in force. Social censure was applied to those who expressed unpopular or uncomfortable ideas.