Programming like Kent Beck

Its refreshing to see that he focuses on integration testing. Most programmers I know understand that in any kind of engineering every decision is a tradeoff. So testing every line of code means you are trading off speed and flexibility for very little gain in some cases (80/20?). XP introduced the idea that there isn't a tradeoff. You take things to the extreme. So as a methodology its not a good one to follow. But as a <i>force</i> it was absolutely beneficial. There were plenty of moderates arguing against the whole waterfall thing for years and getting nowhere. XP recognised (conciously or not, I don't know) that the zealots who enforced waterfall weren't the brighest so there was no point in putting subtle arguments to them. They would only move to something that was a bit boneheaded. And so XP as a force actually managed to move a lot of the industry more twoards the centre.

wasn't beck the person who couldn't solve some basic problem recently? it was mentioned here. [google...] ok, here it is - re-formatting some text (in a very basic way - just clipping lines) - <a href="http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/04/20/Why-Is-Estimating-So-Hard.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/04/20/Why-Is-Estimat...</a> the hn discussion is at <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880522" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880522</a><p>(not sure what my points is; the article here seems quite reasonable - very good advice, in fact, imho. i guess it just stuck in my mind as being so odd.)