Increasing Team Velocity While Improving Quality: A Talk with Kent Beck

I had the pleasure of hosting Kent Beck, one of the key people who shaped Software Engineering as we know it. Kent is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. He introduced Test-Driven Development, Software Design Patterns, and created JUnite.

Embarked on a personal mission to help geeks feel safe in the world, Kent continuously introduces concepts that aim to empower high performance while instilling a sense of safety in engineers.

In this episode, we discuss Extreme Programming and how it evolved organically from an intuitive approach for rapid delivery to a methodology that instantly made sense for teams. We explore the principles of XP along with practical approaches for implementing it within modern engineering teams. We also talk about the cost of software and how balancing the design of the software with feature development can improve the team’s performance and ability to deliver new features quickly.