I never imagined I'd defend Kent Beck.

Date:

Long time, no blog. Too much holiday and managemental duties to keep me away from the development trenches. But I keep up with what others are writing and it has mostly been discussions about code standards and how stupid people think George W. Bush is. Oh, and that really weird C# vs Java thingy.

But hey presto! Things are living up again! And let’s start of with that good girl Chiara who I enjoy immensely but not necessarily agree with.

I don’t think Kent Beck has neither the expertise nor the talent to make decisions about how programmers should work.

Uhhm … how shall I put it … how can I express how much I disagree? When I first was introduced to XP I hated it, since it was shoved down my throat, much the way french geese are fed. Turning point #1 was when I went to, the most excellent, JAOO conference where Kent held a keynote speech. That sort of took my blind hatred away. Then at next years JAOO Martin Fowler had a half-day tutorial in the planning game. My world has not been the same since. We now run our home-grown version of it, pair-programming and all. We twist the idea of the customer on site since we’re a product company, we use JIRA instead of the orthodox way of the cards and a few other things. Oh yeah, we sit down at our morning meetings too.

The point I’m trying too make is that there in my mind are few people in the world better suited to speak out on developer practices than Kent Beck. He, Martin Fowler and Alistair Cockburn my top three sources of wisdom.

I think Rickard is an alien!!

From what I’ve read I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought you were one too ;-)