Kent Beck Quotes

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.

Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values.

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don't know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.

Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it's the most effective way to drive change in the federal government.

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.

Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

Release early and often.

If you're going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don't work.

Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard lower the barriers to accountability in software development and increase the value of developer testing.

Running the test suite like this allows us to catch problems when they are just introduced.

One of the advantages of having to live with JUnit for 8 years is now we can look back and see which decisions we made worked nicely and which we would have done differently.

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

Now we teach our leaders that it's your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

There are major benefits to building a game once and improving it over a long period of time based on user feedback and behavior. It's kind of depressing to have to build a game once, take all the user feedback, and then spend the next 3 years building another game.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.