page_title: Kent Beck
hierarchical_section_title: Kent Beck
caption_attribution_description: English: Kent Beck tells it like it is. The godfather of the XP software development method spoke at our [2001 University of Oregon Computer Science] commencement.
context_page_description: Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development, of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
  Beck pioneered software design patterns, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. He wrote the SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, which spawned the xUnit series of frameworks, notably JUnit for Java, which Beck wrote with Erich Gamma. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki.
  He lives in San Francisco, California and worked at social media company Facebook. Kent has worked at Gusto since April 2019.
context_section_description: Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development (TDD), of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
  Beck pioneered software design patterns, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. He wrote the SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, which spawned the xUnit series of frameworks, notably JUnit for Java, which Beck wrote with Erich Gamma. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki.
  He lives in San Francisco, California and worked at social media company Facebook. Kent has worked at Gusto since April 2019.
caption: Beck speaking in 2001
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