Quotes from Kent Beck

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.

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

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.

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.

I found out that most programmers don't like to test their software as intensely as I do.

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

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

I used Agitator on some code I had unit-tested, and it made me a better tester. As an Agitar Fellow, I look forward to the leverage of working with an outstanding organization as together we continue to improve the value of developer testing.

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.

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.

My great-grandfather played organ for silent movies. Talkies in, Gramps out.

We could talk, act, and dress funny. We were excused for socially inappropriate behavior: 'Oh, he's a programmer'. It was all because we knew this technology stuff that other people found completely mystifying.

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.

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

Inaccurate estimates are a failure of information, not of values or principles. If the numbers are wrong, fix the numbers and communicate the consequences.

The constraint has shifted out of software development. Here's a sad but repeated story: a development team begins applying XP, dramatically improves quality and productivity, but then is disbanded, its leaders fired and the rest of the team scattered.

Actually this book is built on a rather fragile premise: that good code matters. I have seen too much ugly code make too much money to believe that quality of code is either necessary or sufficient for commercial success or widespread use.

Even if there was no long-term economic impact from careful coding I would still choose to write the best code I could.

Readers need to understand programs in detail and in concept. Sometimes they move from detail to concept, sometimes from concept to detail.

Flexibility can come at the cost of increased complexity.

Unlike the names at the roots of hierarchies, subclass names aren't used nearly as often in conversation, so they can be expressive at the cost of being concise.

When objects first became popular, subclassing seemed like a magic pill. First, subclasses were used for classification—a Train was a subclass of Vehicle regardless of whether they shared any implementation. In time, some people saw that since what inheritance did was share implementation, it could most effectively be used to factor out common bits of implementation. Quickly, though, the limitations of subclassing became apparent.