e-Talk Radio: Extreme Programming, 1 February 2001

TEXT TRANSCRIPT: 1 February 2001
Copyright 2001 Quality Plus Technologies and Carol Dekkers. All rights reserved.

Announcer: Welcome to Quality Plus e-Talk! with Carol Dekkers, brought to you by StickyMinds.com, the online resource for building better software. This program will focus on the latest in the field of technology. All comments, views, and opinions are those of the host, guests, and callers. Now let's join your host, Carol Dekkers.

Carol: Good morning, and welcome to Quality Plus e-Talk! with Carol Dekkers. This week, we're just waiting for our guests to phone in. We have Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck, who are two of the three "extremos" from Extreme Programming. Just to tell you a little bit about Extreme Programming, um, Extreme Programming, the two people who are going to be our guests this week have had years and years of experience coming up with the Extreme Programming method. It dates way back to 1989 when they first did some presentations at the Object-Oriented conferences. And we'll just wait a couple minutes for them to phone in and I'll tell you a little bit about me and what I do.

I run a company that is based in Tampa, Florida. We specialize in helping companies, in working with companies to build better software. To do that, you use measurement, software measurement, through targeted training and consulting services and managing by fact. A lot of people may have heard of managing by fact, but if you've got a process improvement initiative under way and you want to know if you're improving, one of the first things you need to do is measure where you are today.

Now, I have a special offer for anyone who is going to be in the San Diego area. I and a number of my colleagues will be at the Applications of Software Measurement Conference, which is run by SQE, or Software Quality Engineering, and they will be in San Diego. We will be there prior to the conference, and we are booking free consulting opportunities. If you're interested and you'd like to meet with us and talk about software measurement, what it might be able to do for you, where you need to get started, please send an email to me at dekkers@qualityplustech.com, or go onto our Web site and from there, you can do the same type of linking. So, it's www.qualityplustech.com.

I'd like to welcome you as a part of our listening audience. This is our number five in a series of thirteen shows, which is also brought to you by our sponsor, StickyMinds.com, which is the online resource for building better software.

If you're listening through StickyMinds or listening through our Web site, I'd like to say "welcome" and I'm hoping that we're going to have a wonderful show today.

Let me get started by introducing our guests before they come on the show, as we're waiting for them to call in. Kent Back was my final series guest last season, on December 5. He's a programmer, he's been one since the middle of what he calls his mis-spent youth in Silicon Valley. His father was a programmer before him, and several of his children are showing what he considers disturbing tendencies along the same lines. He's best remembered for pioneering patterns for software development, the rediscovery of "test-first" programming, the J-Unit testing framework, and most recently, ... programming. In his spare time, he builds small, temporary structures on the 20 acres of his south Oregon ranch he shares with his wife Cindy, five children, two dogs and a variable number