Kent Beck
Kent Beck has been an influential force in the shaping of OO Culture. He is behind influential ideas such as extreme programming, test-driven development, design patterns and CRC cards. Kent Beck also developed the JUnit testing framework together with Erich Gamma. Back in 2001, he was one of 17 signatories of the Agile manifesto.
Kent Beck first came across Christopher Alexander and his ideas at university. He met Ward Cunningham while working at Tektronix and they both became interested in Alexander's work. He adapted Alexander's ideas to software to create design patterns and later may have lifted ideas from Alexander when comming up with extreme programming (see The Alexander conspiracy).
Kent Beck is the author of many books about extreme programming (Kent Beck 2000), Smalltalk, Eclipse, JUnit and test-driven development.
Kent Beck is half of Ward and Kent.
