Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of Extreme Programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a safely social development process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto.
Beck pioneered Test-Driven Development, it's successor TCR: Test && Commit || Revert, software design patterns, and 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract. He wrote the SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, which spawned the xUnit series of frameworks, notably JUnit for Java, which Beck wrote with Erich Gamma. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki.
He lives in San Francisco, California and works as Chief Scientist for Mechanical Orchard. In his leisure time he is an artist, writer, baker, and avid poker player.