Ken Auer

Ken Auer is an OO guru who has been influential in the world of software patterns and who is now most strongly associated with eXtreme programming.

Patterns

Auer became interested in patterns when he met and talked to Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck at OOPSLA 1987. He was part of the Hillside Group who met in 1993 "to forge a marriage of objects and patterns" [1]. Auer's contribution to the first official |Pattern Languages of Programs conference in 1994 became the chapter "Reusability through self-encapsulation" in Pattern Languages of Program Design, 1995. These represent Auer's patterns for dealing with the problem of object encapsulation and access to instance variables. Auer co-authored a chapter in Pattern Languages of Program Design 2, 1996 (see PLoP (Software Patterns Series)) with Kent Beck on the Lazy Optimization pattern [2].

Programming languages

Auer programmed in Smalltalk with Knowledge Systems Corporation (where Ward Cunningham also worked for short time) in the 1980s. He wrote an article about training Smalltalk developers in 1995 [3]. He then set up his own company, RoleModelSoftware and moved toward Java in the late 1990s.

eXtreme Programming

RoleModelSoftware was set up with the aim of building a eXtreme programming team. In 2002 Auer published the book Extreme Programming Applied: Playing to Win! (co-authored with colleague Roy Miller) [4]. At the third XP Agile Universe Conference in 2003 he proposed a revised version of the Rules for XP [5] (now available as [6]).

See Also

• RoleModelSoftware
• Ken Auer's page on Ward's Wiki

References

1. ^ Hillside history
2. ^ Lazy Optimization, Ken Auer and Kent Beck
3. ^ Ken Auer (1995). "Smalltalk training: as innovative as the environment". Communications of the ACM, 38(10), pp. 115-117.
4. ^ Ken Auer and Roy Miller. (2002). Extreme programming applied: playing to win. Addison-Wesley.
5. ^ Ken Auer, Erik Meade and Gareth Reeves (2003). "The Rules of the Game". In Extreme programming and agile methods: XP/Agile Universe 2003. Proceedings of the third XP Agile Universe Conference, New Orleans, LA, USA, August 10-13, 2003, edited by Frank Maurer and Don Wells, Springer.
6. ^ Rules of XP, Ken Auer