(2007-11-14) Beck Interview

Interview with Kent Beck just before his QCon keynote (Extreme Programming). I think what's driving agile development right now is that it's possible to be much more honest, transparent, and accountable if you have short cycles and you decide that that's what you want to accomplish. There's a huge latent market for software development that's just flat-out honest... I think a lot of software projects should fail (Project Failure), and the problem is you just don't know which ones until you're pretty well into it... XP-style development is courageous (Courage), it shares that with cowboy coding. You're going to go and do stuff, there's a bias to action in XP. But cowboy coding is completely opaque, and XP is transparent. Cowboy coding is a solitary activity, and XP is a team activity. Not just programmers working together, but customers, managers, testers... At that point, what does it mean to be agile (Agile Software Development)? I mean, my definition is that you accept input from reality and you respond to it (FeedBack).