Kent Beck, Daedalos Consulting

Biography

Kent has been living with objects in Smalltalk for quite a while now. Some day he hopes to start getting them right, but in the
meantime he will settle for getting them better.

Kent has been lucky enough to be involved in some interesting and influential ideas in objects:

     CRC Cards
     The HotDraw graphic editing framework
     Software patterns
     Extreme Programming

He lives with his wife and 5 kids in Zurich, Switzerland, and longs for his 8 hectare farm in southern Oregon.

     Phone
     Fax
     Email
     kentbeck@csi.com

Abstract

Talk 1:

Extreme Programming: Emergent Control of Software Development

Many software development processes rely on authority flowing from the top down. These processes have all the usual weaknesses of centralized team control. It is possible to create a reliable, predictable, productive software team without centralized control. Using the ideas of emergent behavior we can create self-organizing teams.

Talk 2:

JUnit: Lessons from a Framework

The right framework applied well can dramatically alter the course of a software development. Frameworks done wrong kill projects. JUnit is the Java version of a framework for writing automated tests. Some of the lessons we learned from writing it are:

The talk will present the structure of JUnit as a set of inter-related patterns. It will discuss the history of JUnit and its siblings. It will conclude with lessons for other framework writers.