Kent Beck

Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer, author and consultant best known for creating test-driven development, founding extreme programming and co-creating the JUnit testing framework for Java with Erich Gamma in 2000. He studied computer and information science at the University of Oregon, earning bachelor and master degrees. In 1996 he was hired to work on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System, a payroll project that was running behind schedule under a waterfall process. Beck had his team work in pairs, split the work into small tasks and test and update code frequently, an approach he named extreme programming and described in his 1999 book Extreme Programming Explained. He was one of the seventeen original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, and he published Test Driven Development: By Example in 2003. He worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2018 and then joined Gusto as a software fellow and coach.