Kent Beck
Software Engineer & Creator of Extreme Programming
With Kent, you’ll explore software design through economic, social, statistical and practical lenses to make smarter design decisions. He'll teach you how to refactor safely, manage design changes and tidy code step by step—all while keeping a steady flow of new features.
Talks at GOTO Copenhagen 2025
Masterclasses at GOTO Copenhagen 2025
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.
Beck pioneered Test-Driven Development, it's successor TCR: Test && Commit || Revert, software design patterns, and 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract. 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 in his leisure time he is an artist, writer, baker, and avid poker player.