e-Talk Radio: Beck, Kent, 5 December 2000

want."

Carol: Right. Now, for people who want to know where to start, I think that your book is one of the best kind of basic primers for anyone who wants to know anything about extreme programming. Would you like me to give out the ISBN number for it, so people can find it on Amazon.com, or…?

Kent: Sure.

Carol: Okay, it's called eXtreme Programming Explained, and the ISBN number is 0-201-61641-6.

Kent: There are two other books that have come out recently. Planning Extreme Programming, I wrote with Martin Fowler, which is for project managers. And Ron Jeffries, Ian Anderson and Chet Hendrickson wrote Extreme Programming Installed, which is more of a practical guide for putting it into place, and I'd recommend both of those also.

Carol: And we'll be back to wrap up after these short messages.

I'd like to thank my guest this week, Kent Beck, who has spent his last hour with us and talked a little bit about extreme programming. Kent, in 60 seconds or less of extreme time, what would you like to give our listeners as a sendoff?

Kent: Well, I'd like to talk briefly about how you get started with this. You don't have to drink the whole glass of Kool-Aid all at once. The thing that programmers can do is get some kind of a simple testing framework. I have an open source project called J-Unit, that Eric ……. and I run. And try this test-first programming thing. That's…It'll take you an hour, a couple hours, to get set up and write your first test. At the end of the first day, you'll have some feel about whether that's going to help. And on the project management side, so many projects that I talk to just have no idea of how much stuff they have to do. So, write down or get your customers to write down, the things that they want, on index cards. Write down estimates on each of the cards, do the math, see how things stand. Those are two very simple things you can do, very small investment, quick payoff, and they set you on the road to really turning up all the knobs to ten, and getting a lot more benefit.

Carol: Right. Do you have a Web site you'd like anybody to go to, or that you'd like to give out, if anyone's got comments or questions…

Kent: xprogramming.com is a real good place to start. It's run by Ron Jeffries, and it's got a lot of basic information. There's another one, extremeprogramming.org, which Don Wells runs, that's also got public information. And either of those places will give you links to all the other stuff that's going on.

Carol: Well, I'd like to extend a great thank-you for being our final guest on this series of shows. It's been a lot of fun.

Kent: Thank you.

Carol: And for our listeners, I'd like to tell you that we're moving to a new time starting January 4, 2001. We're going to be moving to Thursday mornings from 10 to 11 a.m. Phoenix time, and Internet broadcasting simulcast through the real audio, which will be 12 to 1 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, and anyone else, anywhere else, that's listening to us, it's 10 'til 11 Phoenix time, starting Thursday, January 4. We've got some exciting things lined up. We've got really interesting guests who will rival some of the guests we've had. We…In the last 13 weeks, we've had Howard Rubin on cybergeography, we've had Heather Winward, who talked about handwriting analysis and team building in