Quotes from Kent Beck

If there are forms of testing, like stress and load testing, that find defects after development is "complete," bring them into the development cycle. Run load and stress tests continuously and automatically.

No matter the circumstance you can always improve. You can always start improving with yourself. You can always start improving today.

Without the adjustment, you are working under a lie. Everyone knows it and has to hide to protect themselves. This is no way to get good software done and deployed;

Cards on a wall is a way of practicing transparency, valuing and respecting the input of each team member. The project manager has the task of translating the cards into whatever format is expected by the rest of the organization.

It's not my job to "manage" someone else's expectations. It's their job to manage their own expectations. It's my job to do my best and to communicate clearly.

However, most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time.

Used Pluggable Adaptor, which we promise not to use again for four months, minimum, because it makes code hard to statically analyze.

Incremental design—We invest in the design every day, but we have the additional constraint that we need to keep our APIs stable.

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

One of the advantages of having to live with JUnit for 8 years is now we can look back and see which decisions we made worked nicely and which we would have done differently.

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

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.

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.

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 are musicians who want to make a living making music. There are listeners who want to listen to music. Complicating this relationship is a whole bunch of history: some of the music I want to listen to was made a while ago in a different economy. Some of the models of making a living making music are no longer valid but persist.

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

Organizations want small changes in functionality on a more regular basis. An organization like Flickr deploys a new version of its software every half hour. This is a cycle that feeds on itself.

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

I don't like the feeling, but I've got to say that a little fear makes me a more focused, more responsible programmer.