Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001.
Kent Beck has an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Oregon. He has pioneered software design patterns, the rediscovery of Test-driven development, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham and along with Erich Gamma created the JUnit unit testing framework.