Person

Kent Beck

Software engineer who created Extreme Programming and helped pioneer test-driven development, iterative delivery, and collective code ownership.

Why this matters

Beck treats software change as a learning loop—short cycles, visible tests, and team-level correction instead of plan-driven certainty.

Focus in observatory

Works

article

Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Beck, Kent, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, and Dave Thomas. "Manifesto for Agile Software Development." 2001. https://agilemanifesto.org/.

Related concepts

Concept

Agile

Agile is used in a software engineering sense. Agile refers to iterative development approaches that shorten feedback cycles, emphasize incremental delivery, and increase team-level ownership of ongoing change.

Related books

Book

Coupling

Cohesion, Consequence, and the Architecture of Responsibility

A practical framework for seeing where systems are tightly joined, where they drift apart, and how those coupling choices shape accountability over time.