Kent Beck Quotes

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.

I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.

When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person's time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.

Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.

A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

He who seeks for gain, must be at some expense.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

Why should I build an asset when I can buy it more cheaply than you can build it?

The payoff of a customer-centric approach to software and digital product design is substantial and long-lasting for both companies and their customers.

It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

He testified that when you looked at it through the eyes of 'let's do it', the costs were very small. They were less than they'd had to spend to host a convention of transportation executives. The cost was not that great.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

I tend to 'splurge' for convenience. I'll pay a lot to not waste time.

With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.

You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.

Why take the pay-per-view gamble? I don't need to do that.

Price is what you pay, but value, as Warren Buffett has observed, is what you get.

You don't try to have the very lowest cost of an asset. You try to have the right asset. So rather than thinking about the lowest cost, the question is how do you get the best productivity.

Valuations are always much-debated. I try to center on what is the value to us. Is it solving a problems for us? If it is, we find a way to proceed. If the valuation has been overhyped on something and it doesn't make sense, we won't. It's very simple for me. I tend not to worry too much about the valuation. It's really what the value is to us.

If I were to spend investor money on nice furnishings and so forth, particularly early on, I might not have it for opportunities that can really grow our business.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.