Kent Beck

Kent Beck
Born	1961 (age 50–51)
Citizenship	United States of America
Fields	Software engineering
Alma mater	University of Oregon
Known for	Extreme Programming, Software design patterns, JUnit

Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies, also named agile software development. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001.

Kent Beck has an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Oregon. He has pioneered software design patterns, the rediscovery of test-driven development, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham and along with Erich Gamma created the JUnit unit testing framework.

Kent lives in Medford, Oregon and works at Facebook.

Publications

Books

• 1996. Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. Prentice Hall. (ISBN 978-0134769042)
• 1996. Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk : A Sorted Collection. Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 978-0521644372)
• 1999. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Addison-Wesley. Winner of the Jolt Productivity Award. (ISBN 978-0321278654)
• 2000. Planning Extreme Programming. With Martin Fowler. Addison-Wesley. (ISBN 978-0201710915)
• 2002. Test-Driven Development: By Example. Addison-Wesley. Winner of the Jolt Productivity Award. (ISBN 978-0321146533)
• 2003. Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins. With Erich Gamma. Addison-Wesley. (ISBN 978-0321205759)
• 2004. JUnit Pocket Guide. O'Reilly. (ISBN 978-0596007430)
• 2005. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition. With Cynthia Andres. Addison-Wesley. Completely rewritten. (ISBN 978-0201616415)
• 2008. Implementation Patterns. Addison-Wesley. (ISBN 978-0321413093)

Selected papers

• 1987. "Using Pattern Languages for Object-Oriented Programs". With Ward Cunningham. OOPSLA'87.
• 1989. "A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking". With Ward Cunningham. OOPSLA'89.
• 1989. "Simple Smalltalk Testing: With Patterns". Origins of xUnit frameworks.

External links

• KentBeck on the WikiWikiWeb
• Kent Beck's page at the Three Rivers Institute
• Kent Beck's blog
• Books by Kent Beck
• [1] sample chapter of Kent's book, IMPLEMENTATION PATTERNS
• [2] TalkWare Podcast interview with Kent Beck
• [3] FLOSS Weekly interview with Kent Beck