Kent Beck lecture

On Wednesday almost all the developers at Stone Three attended a public lecture by Kent Beck at the University of Cape Town. Kent is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP). I was quite please to see how many people attended the lecture.

His style of presenting is quite different from the norm, but I enjoyed the talk a lot. He did not cover much on the XP practices or tried to sell XP at all. He focused on a set of core values, such as communication, respect, courage, integrity, simplicity and feedback, and how these values influence the way he develops software. Using these values and principles he develops the current set of XP practices.

He made it quite clear that everyone should evaluate their own values and principles, then use them to develop practices, customised for themselves, to make software engineering more enjoyable and doing a better job of it. One should not be surprised if you end up with similar practices than advocated by XP.

Overall, he is like a psychiatrist, probing and guiding one to get to the bottom of problems. He then relates processes that worked for him in the past. This way he enthuses people to think a certain way, instead of slamming down a bunch of rules as law and forcing one to adhere to it.
He is very much like Dr. Phil, but for software engineering :)

The lecture was organised by the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) . Apparently they would like to get more "celebs" to come to South Africa for lectures, etc. This would be quite cool and a good thing for the industry.